


And Hate the Idle Pleasures of These Days

by lilith_morgana



Category: Lucifer (TV)
Genre: Angels, Angst and Feels, Angst and Humor, Ella Lopez & Lucifer Morningstar Friendship, Ella Lopez Finds Out, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Gen, Lucifer (TV) Season/Series 05, Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV) Devil Reveal, Romance, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 22:07:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,332
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26196106
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: Grounded from the Silver City, Michael is stuck on Earth. When Ella accidentally prays him into her life, things get pretty complicated.
Relationships: Ella Lopez & Lucifer Morningstar, Ella Lopez & Michael, Ella Lopez/Michael, Michael & Lucifer Morningstar (Lucifer TV)
Comments: 177
Kudos: 350





	1. But deliver us from evil

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this because of a prompt over at discord, realised that I wanted to dig deeeeeeep into the dynamics, fic got a much bigger outline and here we are. The prompt was _“Convinced she's about to die, Ella says a quick prayer. A simple one, automatic. But it mentions Michael by name, and since he's spent time around her and knows her personally, he hears it. And feels compelled to respond. AKA, the one where Ella's intro to the celestial world is Michael turning up to save her life and awkwardly comforting her in the aftermath. Michaella.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  _And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover  
>  To entertain these fair well-spoken days,  
> I am determined to prove a villain  
> And hate the idle pleasures of these days._  
>  **Richard III - Shakespeare**

**  
  
**

  
  


Things don’t go anywhere near, or anything _like_ Michael had thought and if this isn’t just the most tired cliche since the dawn of time he doesn’t know what is.  
  
Father appears, for one thing. Michael doubts a snide bastard like Uriel could have predicted _that,_ not even on a good day. _He_ certainly hadn't and Lucifer who's terrified of ever having to face his fears and talk to their heavenly creator again wouldn’t dare to entertain the thought. And despite Amenadiel’s tendency to run back to the silver throne and tell on them, Michael’s willing to bet he's been occupied elsewhere this time.

Yet here they are.  
  
Father speaks to them after endless, hopeless silence. 

After years at his right side up in the solitary throne room, literal human _years_ filled with nothing but Michael’s own voiced thoughts, his confessions, his plans. _Well_ , he had ventured at last, bold and bored in equal measures like the graceless creature he is, _feel free to disagree with me here, Dad_. 

Apparently that time is now.

Michael feels the presence in the air around them, feels the terrifying lack of triumph as Father’s gaze holds Michael’s own for a beat, no more than a second - brief and fractured like a mortal life, and just as hollow. He feels the chains of history rattle around his wrists again, yanking him back. _It will never be you_.  
  
Feels the absence of Heaven later as the gates to the Silver City disappear with a soundless whimper.  
  
“Aw,” Azrael says besides him, the hard edge to her gentle voice so much like Lucifer’s, sometimes. “Looks like someone’s _grounded_.”  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
  
“You know, your... punishment makes sense.” Amenadiel eyes him calmly in the bar across the street from the motel Michael has resorted to staying at. He knows enough about humans to understand the inherent degradation of his location, the implications about one's character. "To me, at least."

"Well, I'm reassured then," Michael snaps, feeling a soul-splitting ache in his entire being at the thought of this carrying any semblance of reason or fairness. It’s spite that has formed it, he can see it no other way, despite knowing better, always _better_. Fuck, but he’s tired of knowing better or trying to, his mind wants to rest in something. "If someone with your _mighty_ intellectual capacity deems it sensible."

"Come on, brother. Don’t be like this.”  
  
Michael downs his drink and refills it immediately. In this, if nothing else, he’s a mirror of his twin. It’s the sting and burn of hard liquor, the brief respite. For a second he forgets the gates of Heaven. And Lucifer’s gaze when he had found out, the peculiar threads of disgust and anger in it. It hadn’t been directed at Michael, even, at least not entirely.  
  
“ _This_ is how dear old Dad made me, as you well know.”  
  
“Is it?” Amenadiel glances sideways and meets his gaze. “Is it really?”  
  
Scoffing, Michael reaches for the bottle. " _Don’t_.”

Back when Samael stumbled around in the Silver City, unable to tell foe from ally, clinging to arrogance and self-delusions, Amenadiel had always refused to become involved. He'd keep his own counsel, take a step back. He’d been the strongest of faith and the least likely to question the confusing truths and half-lies of Heaven. Self-righteous and sturdy, a shield and a beacon of _Father's_ _infinite bloody light_ \- Michael had found him insufferable then, finds him insufferable now. Only here, caught up in the feral games of the earthly animals, his big brother has found his way to the light-bringer's side and they're both stronger for their mutually misplaced faith.  
  
“All I’m saying, Michael, is that if humans have taught me anything, it’s that everyone’s more complex than it seems.”  
  
_Even you, some would argue,_ Lucifer adds in his head. _You twisted bloody gargoyle.  
  
_Amenadiel leans back in his seat, so smug now that the deluded order within his personal belief system is restored and he can deliver wisdom to his younger siblings again. 

“All I’m saying, Michael, is that you could see this as a chance to learn.”  
  


  
  
*  
  
  
  
“So, _Michael_.” Doctor Linda Martin narrows her eyes and looks at him. He's met her before but she doesn’t know that - or if she’s as intelligent as Lucifer claims and had figured it out, she doesn’t tell him. He, on the other hand, knows all about her fear-laced love for her child and the guilt she still feels every time that spawn falls asleep in her arms, the terror dancing at the back of her memory. He knows what she would die to protect and what she sees when she thinks of Hell. It doesn’t exactly leave them on an equal footing but as long as he’s got the upper hand he hardly minds.  
  
“Yes,” he confirms instead and arranges the spoon beside his coffee mug to lie aligned with the patterns on the aggressively colourful coaster beneath.  
  
She inhales visibly before she cuts right to the core of her concerns. He respects that, at least.  
  
“Are you going to be a threat to my son?”

Michael considers laughing. It’s certainly a ridiculous enough question to be a joke. But the doctor stares so intently at him from the other side of what he remembers is referred to as a _kitchen island_ that he finds himself sighing instead.  
  
“Oh for _God’s_ sake, I didn’t give Chucky the measles.”  
  
“Actually, it’s not - you know what, never _mind_.” She shakes her head. “I just want your word.”

Looking down into his half-empty coffee, Michael marvels at this wild idea of trust. Why do humans think they can get a promise from him and hold him to it? How do they imagine it will work? As though promises - from anybody - aren't just smoke and mirrors until they're chained to an actual consequence, be it a reward or a threat.  
  
“What’s the point? Have you got the faintest idea of how good I am at lying?” he asks, out of genuine curiosity. He was never entirely able to tell the difference between when his pranks or demonstrations got the attention he wanted from his siblings and when his efforts were in vain, so he's unsure if Amenadiel has explained the last few months to the mother of his Nephilim. Perhaps it doesn’t matter to her.  
  
Doctor Linda Martin puts down the mug she’s been cleaning, slams both of her palms into the kitchen counter and stares at him until he meets her gaze.   
  
“ _Michael_ ,” she says in a disciplinary tone that almost makes him grin. His name sounds like the lashing of a whip in the air. It reminds him of Mother, strangely enough.  
  
“Fine.” He shrugs. “If that’s what it takes for you to grasp that I have no interest whatsoever in hurting or even _touching_ Chucky, then yeah, you have my word.”

  
  
*  
  
  


It's a night like all others in this city: too loud, disgustingly crowded and full of lights and pollution. From the street outside his motel room, he can hear the buzz of nearby bars, the sounds of engines and police sirens. 

He misses the crisp nothingness of Heaven, the clear-cut lines and the silence. Earth seems designed on purpose so that no thought can be finished, that everything inevitable ends up scattered, fractured, _incomprehensible_. Everything they do is just a chaotic flurry of response to surges of drives and fears. He yearns to smooth out the flaws in this earthly existence, flatten them with the force of his might, sort it out. That _had_ been the intended purpose for his powers, had it not?  
  
Trust Lucifer to hide for so long in these structures of chaos. Perhaps it suits someone whose powers are those of alteration but for Michael, made to create and maintain order, it’s a dull ache in some remote corner of his being.  
  
As is _this_ utter waste of his time and talent.  
  
He walks around in the city at night, trying to get a sense of things, to estimate the boundaries, and reach for the borders of this whole situation. Trying to see the proportional relation between all these useless matters, between the replaceable individuals.  
  
He figures his brothers and Father would take offense at the word _replaceable_ so he uses it again, ever the inefficient rebel, spells it out in his mind.  
  
When he’s about to walk into a night-open store to pick up something to eat, he suddenly hears it.  
  
The brittle calling, like rain trickling down.  
  
The prayer isn’t coherent but then again, real prayers rarely are.  
  
There was a time when people asked, specifically _asked_ , for his brothers and sisters and him. Oh, did they ever call for _him_ . Shit, there are _tons_ of statues and paintings to prove it even if a majority of those were created by humans during various stages of intoxication and even if the stories may have suffered from a case of exaggerations or been third- och fourth-hand information. Still, they carry pieces of someone’s truth.  
  
These days humans mostly utter real prayers in moments of absolute despair or crises of faith and the angels are usually left out of them, or if they appear the prayer versions are still arguably so far removed from the angels themselves that they can get away with not recognising it.

This is different.

What he picks up now is a string of frantically detached pleas and fears, sure, but they are wrought together by a hard line of faith intentionally aimed at him.  
  
_Defend us in battle, O Prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God - no nos dejes caer en tentación, y líbranos del mal -_

 _Fuck it. Just - please?_ _  
_ _  
_ The tone feels familiar, he realises as the words sink in; it catches hold of something in his brain. He _recognises_ it, not just the voice but the purpose, the thread back to his genesis. And in a world where nothing is as he wants it to be, it strikes him as oddly comforting to be called to do this, at least. 

So he does. There’s really nothing more to it.  
  
Well, at least not at _first_. 

  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
The prayer comes from a back alley in the outskirts of the most densely populated area - the _anthill_ , he calls it in his head, nothing but a gutter of people chafing against each other, wasting their lives on shallow consumption and make-believe. It irritates him that he'll have to file them into Heaven's ranks in fifteen, twenty, fifty years because what have they done with their boundless freedom? What was the point of their free will? Setting them on course towards destruction? _You find fault with humanity because they make you question Father_ , Raphael had commented once because Raphael is nothing but a marvel at stating the obvious. He'd make a lovely little mortal.  
  
Michael lands on a rooftop and spots her immediately, surrounded by a handful of people that don’t seem to attack her, not exactly, though she’s attempting to get away all the same.  
  
It’s the painfully extroverted forensic scientist of the LAPD, the one who respects personal boundaries about as much as Lucifer respects common decency. Miss Ella Lopez, with high work-ethics and a questionable past. Or so he had guessed, back when she mattered to his plans. He never got to know her secrets since Lucifer’s life was so brimful of other pawns, but he remembers her well. 

It's also, he’s forced to admit, something very off about the whole thing because the supposed attackers don’t appear to be human. Or demons, for that matter. They are, he knows when he positions himself in the middle of the ranks to throw them out of Miss Lopez’s way, something _else_.  
  
He blinks and then they’re gone, the fabrics of reality swirling shut behind them.  
  
Before he’s had time to even make a mental note to talk to someone about that, Miss Lopez turns on her heel. And stares - eyes narrowing, then widening - at his unfurled wings that are still flapping threateningly around him.  
  
“What the - _mierda_. Oh no, oh _no_.”  
  
“Miss Lopez-”  
  
Michael straightens up as best he can, wills his voice to be angelic in that human way these creatures seem to respond so well to, softens the edges of Creation and the fear of God in his blood.  
  
“Lucifer? What are you?” Miss Lopez surprises him, not by running away which had been a reasonable thing to do, but to run up to him, placing her hand on his arm, his shoulder, even his face and he cannot but remain, allowing her this.  
  
He all but _flinches_ at the vulnerability in her, the naked emotions in her touch. _Father, they are so weak. You ask too much._  
  
“ _Lucifer_ \- how-” The hardest layer of fear seems to drop once she realises he’s corporeal but she continues to stare into his face.

Her instincts and emotions overwhelm him for a moment, create a roaring, furious sound at the back of his mind before he gathers himself and quells the rush of fear he exudes. It takes longer than it ought to; he gets entangled in her humanity and she, in turn, gets caught up in her own loop of nightmares.

Miss Lopez fears a lot of things, though curiously this potential death at the hands of strangers isn’t one of them. The fractured flurry of impulses he picks up reveals other, much more complex little terrors: rejection, damnation, _madness_. Her mind flashes open and he gets a slice of its contents. There’s a wrecked car, a stuffed doll bleeding at the seams, a hospital bed, a casino somewhere and lilies, lots and lots of lilies as well as a broken sentence - _choking on their own blood._ _  
_ _  
_ _You don’t have to be afraid_ , he thinks - God only knows when he last used _that_ phrase, did he ever? - to wrestle the situation back under control. Which he does, eventually, though it has taken too long, she’s been exposed to far too much. Whatever soothing thing he would say now - and let’s face it, he’s never been good at those - she would still reel from stumbling into the unknown otherness of his being. _I won’t hurt you._ _  
_  
“Lucifer?” she asks again at that promise, snapping out of the spiral.  
  
“It’s Michael,” he says. “I’m Michael.”  
  
Shaking her head, Miss Lopez looks over her shoulder as if she’s expecting someone else to arrive. Her face looks overly pale, her mouth a thin line. 

"Oh shit no, it's _you_ , you’re _him_ ," she says, her eyes wide and blank for a second. She mutters something inaudible in Spanish, too, before fainting without grace into his arms. 

  
  


*  
  
  
  
  
The hospital smells of disinfectants and detergent, a keenly clean scent that cuts into the warm, spicy notes from the body he just carried into the Emergency Room. He had left her in a chair, scared a nurse into taking care of Miss Lopez right away and then pushed out of the building again.  
  
“Mr Morningstar?” Outside, another nurse with a cigarette in his hand greets him, that expectant glint in his eyes that Michael remembers.  
  
He thinks about the heady, simplistic pleasures of pretense back when he was, indeed, Mr Lucifer Morningstar, for a little while. When he borrowed - fine, _stole_ \- a life he had thought would contain mostly debauchery and idiocy but that had, admittedly, been much more interesting than that. Above all it had been layered with the makings of a mortal existence: connections, contortions, acquaintances, shared memories, people remembering his face and deeds, people expecting favors or just pleasantries from the Devil. Navigating the LAPD’s precinct had, in itself, required more attention than he could have guessed beforehand. Wherever he went those days, he felt as though he had left a mark, or been marked. It had added a peculiar tenacity to it all.   
  
This nurse, for example, clearly knows his brother from somewhere. Likely a bedroom.  
  
“Mr Morningstar, is that you?” he asks again and Michael tucks his hands into his pockets and keeps walking.  
  
“No,” he says and shakes his head. The hitch in his shoulder is more pronounced than ever after flying and then having had to conceal the wings immediately after. He usually gives them a little time. “I’m not him.”


	2. Dark side of the morning

She sits in his motel room later that same night, as the dark earth turns and time stretches towards dawn.  
  
A tiny human presence, slumped and worse for wear but with that strange equanimity to her. Like there’s a level of her mind that keeps operating despite what he must assume is a fairly substantial existential crisis. It’s the kind of spirit that had led Chloe Decker to shoot him even as he was baiting and breaking into her make-believe life with his undeserving twin.  
  
Ella Lopez, he reckons, wouldn’t hesitate for one single _fraction_ of a moment to do the same. This one has faith, too, a stubborn, almost _touching_ faith in God that rests like a shield around her. How she’s been able to keep it in this mess of a city, with her crass line of work, he’d like to know.  
  
Okay, that might mostly be a figure of speech, but he wouldn’t _mind_ knowing it. He’ll give her that.  
  
He hadn’t asked her how she found him when she pounded on his door a while ago; she hadn’t explained beyond _I have connections, dude_ and _I was out for like five minutes_ and then, without further ado, she had walked up to the minibar in the corner of his tiny place and grabbed a beer. Her hand had been shaking around the lukewarm bottle as she had drank it, all of it, without a word.  
  
Now she sits cross-legged on the frightfully ugly bedspread on his motel bed and rubs the bridge of her nose. The big glasses she wears rests on her head, partly buried in her hair.  
  
Michael wonders, idly, why she isn't more afraid.  
  
Before, in that street, he had picked up fears without even trying and the shape of them had remained, a simmering worry that could be felt even as he held her unconscious body in his arms. The only thing that lingers now is a small prickling of surprise, or unease.  
  
“Show me,” she says, placing the empty bottle on the carpet.  
  
He feels tired and sore and dissatisfied with the whole thing. This is the problem with Earth, with this damn city - it’s cluttered and _sticky_ , everything you do spirals something new into motion, sets another piece off. All he wanted was to answer a rare prayer, do his thing and get out - not play with one of Dad’s puppets all night long. It’s just not _right_. Unlike his brothers and contrary to popular belief, he does care about that sort of thing. Well, at least somewhat and for his own reasons but still. Humans are not meant to be facing angelic powers, are not created to _comprehend_ the glory of Creation other than reflected through a distant light. Humans weren’t meant for a lot of things and angels are meant to _protect_ them but it seems long ago now since anyone tried. 

_Are you still playing at bettering God’s pet project?_ Lucifer mocks at the back of his mind. _You know the definition of madness is to try the same thing over and over and hope for a different outcome, right?_

“Show you what?” he asks, despite knowing the answer.  
  
“What you _are_.” Her voice falters a little. There’s only so much bravery in one single human even if this particular woman appears to have more of it than most.  
  
“You saw what I am.” 

Her face is calm and pale but everything else in her, he knows, is fluttering. He can see the corners of her mouth twitch but there’s no smile appearing. Instead he scents fear again - long-buried but never appeased fear. It shifts in a certain way, its shape different from the reactive, fresh terrors. Mostly it resembles a darkness, palpable and moving.  
  
“Yeah, but - you’ve got to give me something more to work with. Dude, I’m not crazy here, right? Because I’ve been seeing things before and -” she takes a deep breath, steadies herself by planting her hands on her knees as she looks up, into Michael’s eyes. “ _Please_.”

Is this how Lucifer does it? Amenadiel? Do they face their chosen little mortals and divulge facets - only ever the useful or pleasant ones, he assumes - of their divinity in order to please them? To receive their gratefulness and worship and eternal desire? An impressive flicker of a pair of wings, a glimpse of mercy or grace, a timely rescue. Michael bites back a sour taste of bitterness at the very notion. When he stole Lucifer’s life and Lucifer’s partner he had saved her life twice - two times less than the number of bullets she put in his body - and there had been something to it, of course it had.  
  
Her fragile shape in his, the quickening of her pulse, the warm, coiling fear of dying that he had soothed with his powers without her even realising it. It had felt like following an ancient command back to a time that still exists as a whisper somewhere in the faint dawn of eternity, a truth encapsulated in a memory. When he had put her down again she had looked at him with pure wonder in her eyes - a sentiment devoid of fear, of awe, of all the things that angels are created to instill in humans and for a beat, Michael had forgotten everything else.  
  
His wings appear slower this time, slower and perhaps less frightening as he’s sitting at the edge of the bed, not towering in front of her in a dark back alley.  
  
Ella gasps.   
  
They’re not his brother’s wings, of course, alight with God’s love and all the stars in the sky; they’re not the epitome of freedom and desire, not even of faith or healing or beauty. Michael can’t offer that.  
  
But she gasps and the sound - sharp and sudden, like a knife slicing through the room - is delighted, _delightful_. Her gaze follows the shape behind him, her face utterly still in concentration and bewilderment and when she finally looks away he spots a glittery hint of tears in her eyes.  
  
Yeah, he decides. There’s _something_ to it.  
  
  


  
*  
  
  


She sits in his motel room when light breaks, holding another beer, moving the bottle from one hand to another, a fretful motion designed only to keep the hands busy.   
  
He’s never spent this much time on his own with a mortal before. During all extended visits to Earth he’s typically keeping to himself or trying to escape into a crowd, muddling the effects of his powers somewhat. Enough people around and nobody knows exactly from where the sense of unease originates, giving him a chance to breathe. It’s for the same reason, he knows, that Lucifer’s countless appearances here are tied to parties and revolutions, wars and gatherings. Alone like this, powers like theirs are usually unavoidably _sharp_. But despite scrutinizing Ella at every given opportunity, he can’t discern any flagrant anxiety or terror lurking in the corners of her mind.  
  
He feels her fear, sure, but it’s muted, walled-off.  
  
If he didn't know better and _oh_ he does, he’d say she’s afraid, but not of _him_.  
  
She’s been talking nonstop for a good hour now, offering him endless material if he’ll ever find himself in need of intriguing things and nonsensical tidbits about her. But for someone like her, who talks to stop thinking and fend off her demons, the real power rests in her silence and her questions. That’s where she’s truly visible.  
  
“What was it that came for me in that alley?” Ella asks, voice harsher than it’s been all night. “And you’ve gotta tell me the truth here because _damn_.”  
  
Michael hesitates. Here it is, the most slippery of all bonds between the twin creatures they once were. The honest Prince of Lies and his lying deceitful twin. Michael, who knows better than anyone the transformative power that rests in an illusion, the magnitude of it, it's fantastic weight and reach. Lucifer, who still maintains his eccentric habits of never lying, only withholding information and avoiding truthful conversations while taking full credit for absolute honesty. It was the principle he had been most arrogant about in Heaven and, coincidentally, the most jarring lie Michael has ever heard.   
  
“They were beings from another dimension,” he says, thinking how simple it is to always hide behind the truth, to mistake it for a virtue.  
  
It isn’t.  
  
  


*  
  
  


She sits in his motel room when the morning traffic starts up again outside.

There seems to be no way to quickly get rid of a curious human you recently exposed your angelic form to, so Michael resigns instead, leans against the wall and watches her face display every shade from confusion and awe to irritation and revelation. It’s not like he’s got anything better to do here on Earth; it’s not like his punishment had been delivered with an instruction manual.  
  
Ella Lopez suddenly scrutinizes him more intensely, a shift behind her eyes. 

"Chloe told me about you," she says. “Before Pete - before everything went completely batshit... _loco_.” 

Of course she did. Michael had known, the moment he got to the precious Detective, that she would make a whole lot of noise about it - he tells himself he wouldn’t have messed with her otherwise but that’s probably a lie - and he had been fascinated and slightly amused by her resilience. Not that he had expected the Gift from God to be submissive and meek - _far_ from it, if dear old Father gives Lucifer a gift, of course it is going to be finely tuned to cater to his specific desires, what else?   
  
Even so, she had impressed him. _Challenged_ him.   
  
He sighs. "I was never going to hurt her. She was just -"

"Part of a plan, right? Yeah, I got that." The darkness he could feel before lives in her voice again. She might not actively fear him, but her distrust is a beacon. Fair enough, he thinks. For someone who has lived out roughly half her lifespan already she’s entirely too old to be naive. After their brief, distasteful childhoods that sort of thing just becomes repulsive. “Why, though?”  
  
“Why wasn't I going to hurt her?” He hears his voice, aloof and annoyed, like a child talking back to a parent. “Because I have no _interest_ in hurting humans.”  
  
He wonders if she realises _how_ true this is. If she grasps that out of everything that lives and breathes out there in the vast universe, so very few things care about humanity at all. That Father and his angels might be the only ones.  
  
“Only your brother, yeah? That is some fucked up family drama.” She shakes her head. “I’m not judging - well, I _am_ , not gonna lie.”  
  
Michael smiles, mostly to himself. “Of course you are.”  
  
“My family’s a mess but we don’t kidnap each other.”  
  
“Do you start grand-scale wars that threaten the multiverse?”  
  
For a second she just stares at him, then, for the first time, she cracks a smile. “Man. Oh _man_. This is…”  
  
He nods, stretching out a bit in an attempt to make this stupid iteration of him hurt less. "It is."

“What were you going to use me for?” The casual tone doesn’t match the intensity of her stare. “In that Machiavellian super villain plan of yours?”

He can’t really tell her the truth: that he had thought it would be too difficult, that he had felt her faith like a hard, burning presence in her body as she hugged him - without Chloe’s harsh lines of questions and doubts, devoid of her suspicion, bursting with a _trust_ in his brother that still leaves a stitch in Michael. That he had pushed her aside after meeting Dan, the least stable human male in the whole precinct. That there had been that _something_ again, in the way she _chose_ to believe in him, no matter how atrocious the lies that they all had wrapped Lucifer in were. He can’t tell her that. 

"I never thought about it," he lies instead. "You seemed peripheral."

" _Ouch_ ,” she says, very quietly.  
  
Oh, _humans_.  
  


  
*  
  


  
“The _Endless_?” His brother, wearing a woman's bathrobe and carrying a whiskey bottle, leans over the bar in his penthouse and picks up another bottle, hands it over to Michael and reaches for glasses. “Haven’t heard from them in literal eons. Are you _sure_?”  
  
“Well, obviously I wasn’t given the opportunity to _study_ them for long.” Michael straightens, narrows his eyes. There’s a defensiveness in his own tone that he abhors, that tastes dully of history and betrayal. "They looked at me and disappeared."  
  
“They’re not aggressive entities.”  
  
“I _know_ that, Lucifer. I'm not suggesting we fight them."  
  
"No? Good to know. With you, I can never tell. One day it's pleasant conversations, brotherly bickering, the next you show up with the heavenly Host." His history revisionist brother sits down, leans back and adjusts his robe in that preposterous way he has of drawing attention to his appearance at all possible times. It's probably carved into his bones at creation, written on the inside of his soul. _All eyes on me, lest I rebel!_ “If the Endless got through-”  
  
“It means reality is bleeding somewhere, yes.” Michael recalls the ages of creation by his brother’s side, the irreverence Lucifer had shown as they forged their powers together, bound them to each other’s might. Creativity and power, made to intertwine yet his twin has always pretended his will - the Will - is the only thing that matters, the only worthy purpose, an ideal so superior it was worth bloody destruction to defend. As though Will alone, with its degrading chase after useless freedom isn’t the most destructive force ever created. "You've certainly meddled enough with it lately to know that."  
  
The Silver City had been buzzing when _Amenadiel_ of all self-righteous little warriors had wreaked havoc down below, ignoring the sanctity of death to serve his own agenda. Or Father’s agenda, as he kept claiming, voice a bit more frantic for every time he visited. At least Amenadiel had been remorseful, tearful, brimful of fear. _Forgive me, Father._ Lucifer would mostly likely rather let the multiverse implode before he uttered a prayer of forgiveness.   
  
Heaven had held its collective breath when he destroyed Uriel and, subsequently, tore a hole in reality to save Mother.  
  
And then, as always, the forays into the forbidden had been forgotten because _have you heard what he did, returning to Hell? For humanity’s sake, can you believe it._ _  
_  
One human, Michael had corrected them, _his_ human.

"I didn't _meddle_ ," Lucifer protests, but they both hear the hollowness in that line of defense. 

"And here I thought you _never_ lie,” he drawls, forming his voice to sound deliberately smarmy the way he knows everyone hates. For once, Michael has the upper hand in their ancient, hopeless battle and he intends to savour it. “But maybe I'm still the exception." 

His twin doesn’t deign to reply, his face is averted as he drinks in silence. Michael hasn't touched the glass and bottle yet, he places them both on the table and gets to his feet again. His back is twisted and stiff, his earth-bound body requires sleep. 

“I’ll look into the Endless,” Lucifer says, refilling his glass.  
  
“I should hope so.”

It’s not a threat, not per se, more of a nuisance. Not least of all because it would require their intense and dedicated collaboration, just like last time. _Last time_ that is still an angry scar somewhere back there, out of reach. Shaping the multiverse around them, mending all tears and building new dimensions, wrecking themselves incorrigibly in the process since of course they hadn’t agreed. Of _course_ Samael hadn’t agreed with their tasks, because when does he ever, when has he ever followed a single order? And then, at the end of it, after their upsetting differences and drawn-out struggle he had presented his petty, selfish disagreements to the rest of the angels like insights, deep understanding of the fabric of the universes.   
  
Michael prefers not to end this time with a war in Heaven. 

Lucifer remains where he is, looking out through the massive panorama windows in his ridiculous home. All this space, all the extravagant and overwhelming details to anchor him in a place that can never be his home. There’s a solitude to his shape that clashes against what Michael knows - what _everyone_ knows - about his brother, a shade of grief or maybe even longing.  
  
“And you should talk to Ella - to your Miss Lopez,” Michael says as he walks out, not bothering to wait for his brother to reply. "Maybe wanna, oh I don"t know, prepare a quick summary of Hell."  
  
The reply comes, quickly, thrown after him before he steps into the elevator.  
  
“To Miss Lopez? Michael, you bastard, what did you _do_?”

*

  
  


Three weeks later he gets a bill from the Emergency Room sent to his motel.  
  
He scrutinizes it for a long while at first, frowning at the sender, frowning at the _numbers_ , the incomprehensible system at work in these strange lands, so far removed from a natural, _reasonable_ , order of things - then understanding some of it a little better as a handwritten note on a pink post-it falls out and lands on his shoe. 

Picking it up, he scents the same notes of grapefruit and sandalwood that have been haunting his room.  
  
 _Next time I faint around you, just make me lie down, okay? Google is your friend. Cheaper for everyone. See you around. /Ella._

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Endless as well as Michael and Lucifer dual powers are borrowed from the vast and sprawling comics universe. 
> 
> Thank you for reading!


	3. Self-creation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _“Our words create us, from one moment to the next. When you lie, it’s that act of self-creation that’s sabotaged and corrupted."_   
>  **― Mike Carey, Lucifer, Book Three**

The night outside glitters and soars, like nothing in Heaven nor, Michael boldly assumes, in Hell.   
  
They stand on Lucifer’s balcony, watching the spot in the sky where their powers would manifest, had they succeeded in combining them. And for weeks now, they’ve tried. Intertwining the two most powerful forces in Heaven into one core, a might strong enough to mend the fabric that surrounds their reality. Forging Michael’s blunt force of creation together with Lucifer’s sprawling, magnificent will, reclaiming their very purpose.   
  
Except it doesn’t _work_.  
  
After millennia of letting this specific aspect of him rest in the void that separates him from his brother, Michael tries to raise and command the power that once made realities in the multiverse, that breathed life into the empty eternity. Its shape is still there, he feels it, he _knows_ it - a dark outline in the distance. He has missed it like one misses a piece of one’s being, has imagined its return, the prerequisites for it.  
  
He has never imagined it like _this_. The form he’s trying for, the meaningless shape he’s trying to build with the energy from his brother’s will just to test it, thread the waters and find their footing and all trite expressions humans have formed to conceal their lacking talents, the form he’s trying for doesn’t happen. It doesn't manifest, doesn’t show. The matter remains scattered, unformed.  
  
“Well, that’s underwhelming,” Lucifer says, staring at the nothingness. He says it in his light-hearted tone, the arrogant, untouchable one that sends sparks of rage into Michael’s very soul.  
  
Michael who crushes a part of a cloud in frustration, raining fat little drops down on the passers-by. _Always so dramatic, Mikey. It’s almost endearing._   
  
Lucifer who downs a glass of whiskey and glances sideways at him. 

“Chin up,” he drawls. “Humans claim it happens to all men at some point. Or so I’ve _heard_ , obviously I’ve got no first-hand experience with-”  
  
Michael unfurls his wings and takes off before his brother has finished the sentence but he still thinks he can hear it thrown after him like a divine boomerang.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
The afternoon the following day is bright and busy, cars and people crowding on the streets below. It’s a place where life happens behind a smokescreen and it fits his twin like Heaven never did. There’s a stitch of jealousy at the notion, the freedom that he was given despite it all - _earned_ , he’d probably claim.  
  
It’s a twisted enough curse in itself that Father has made them like this, as a dark premonition of future suffering and oh, Lucifer would always claim that was the case, spend unlimited time throwing his rage into any crowd, insensitive in his conviction. _He’s manipulating us, can’t you see it? We’re just playthings._  
  
“Amenadiel has a theory,” he says now.  
  
Michael snorts. “Shocking.”  
  
Lucifer makes a little shrug, the cool detachment he’s so fond of written all over his features. It’s a shallow lie - even a mortal could see through his brother’s feeble-minded attempts - but probably his most treasured one. _  
_  
“He thinks we need to… readjust our powers. That they’ve changed over the years.”  
  
“Father has obviously taken away mine, so what’s the point?” Michael stares at his hands, as if they hold the answer. His right hand twitches, fingers curling slightly. Maybe that’s what's wrong with him, maybe that’s how his powers got as crooked and disfigured as the rest of him. In that case, all prospects of it ever returning are gone. “Apart from you getting a chance to gloat, of course.”  
  
“But you _have_ powers, haven’t you? Apart from this hopefully temporary impotence, I mean.”  
  
“Stop _calling_ it that.” There’s no reason for the inane, meaningless jabs to get to him, but they do, they always do and Michael isn’t sure who he hates the most for it - Lucifer or himself. Might actually be a tie. “And don’t worry about my powers, _I’m_ not the one who’s been popping in and out of immortality over the years.”  
  
The dark side of that coin being, Michael’s grudgingly had to admit to himself recently, that self-actualization seems to be beyond him altogether. If it _wasn’t_ , he sure as Samael’s abandoned kingdom wouldn’t remain a twisted hunchback.   
  
“I suppose it isn’t.” Lucifer’s eyes narrow. “Very well then, no time to waste. Figure it out, Michael. Whatever’s wrong.”  
  
Michael's hands are both fists as his brother swaggers away, brushing off their little spats fast as ever. 

  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
The night, the fourth night in a row they attempt to use their powers, is a rainy one. Or a briefly rainy one, true to this city’s standards. Michael’s already _done_ with this part of the world, he’d vastly prefer solitary nature, wet forests or medieval architecture - he’s always been a fan of that, back then humans were making progress and he had found them enjoyable to observe, trudging along. Now, here, they’re just embarrassing themselves and each invention is stupider than the last.  
  
“Do you want to know what I think, Michael? I think you’re not even trying.” Lucifer ventures, serving himself another drink.  
  
“That so?”  
  
“Yes.” Something passes in his brother’s face. A rare kind of frustration in the golden one, the brightest shining angel. He’s worried, Michael realises. He fears for his little mortals - again, not for _humanity_ , only ever the select humans he likes to fuck or play with - and their immense, unavoidable suffering if the reality they know gets warped off its course. “I think you have your own agenda, as usual.”  
  
“An agenda to do what, end reality? Why the fuck would I want that?”  
  
“I don’t know what you plot, Michael. I never did, remember?” Lucifer straightens up, stands tall and proud and self-assured, ever the fallen angel in their arguments. It’s been this way since the dawn of creation, the same dynamic repeating itself like an imagined lineage greater than themselves. “But it’s got to be _something_ . You hardly breathe without creating a lie.”  
  
Michael can’t help but laugh. Even to him the sound is too bitter, laced with all the Heavenly rage and grief he’s spent his millennia up there honing into something more useful. Down here it all scatters, like his powers.  
  
“Should the Devil lecture me about lies? Really? Tell me, isn’t your entire relationship with the Gift from God based on lies? Or do you prefer the word pretense?” He can see right away that his words land where they hurt. _Good_. “It doesn’t matter that you’ve shown her the truth, brother, you know deep down that it doesn’t. When her time here is over, what will you do? Huh? Will you and our self-righteous big brother tear up the patterns of life and death - again? Will you barge into Heaven and drag her back down? Tell me, because I’m _really_ interested.”  
  
He knows he will never actually get an answer to his questions, not like this. Because Lucifer has perfected what Michael’s learned the humans call compartmentalizing - breaking that mechanism is usually the key to letting all sorts of fear loose - and coated it in all the celestial arrogance he possesses.  
  
"You think I’m afraid of you?”  
  
“No, I think you’re _afraid_.” Michael sneers. “Mostly of Father. And yourself.”  
  
“Is that what you want? For me to say that I am?” Lucifer looks at him, looks over Michael's shoulder and into their reflection in the window like a child observing its own reactions, instigating every emotion. “You always go on with the lies and the fear and the manipulation, just like Dad, really. But what is it that you _want_ , eh?"

They'd assess each other like that, back when the universe was new. Balance fear and desire, creation and will, let their powers boil and crack, opening up for transformation. Michael knows he has never been that powerful since, knows he will never be again. They were the consummation of creation and the universe was theirs. 

This is just an age-old wound, unhealed and festering.

Michael feels his momentum collapsing in the face of his own frustration, feels Lucifer’s powers getting to him, prying into enclosed enclaves in his soul the same way his twin’s fears are a palpable presence in the room. "I want you to face the consequences of your actions"

And it’s true.  
  
After all this time it’s still just as embarrassingly true.  
  
Lucifer who wanted a war without blood on his hands, a rebellion without destruction. Clean, honourable, dignified. As though war ever is.

"I was cast out of Heaven! How much more consequence do you need?"

A dark echo clicks in Michael's memory. 

"You knew what the stakes were. Fuck your martyrdom, Samael, you _knew_. If you hadn't been such a damn hypocrite about it -" He clenches his right hand and unclenches it again. "Mother defended you, did you know? Her precious lightbringer, the king of Hell. Of course she wouldn’t have it. She tore up what little of Heaven you hadn't already wrecked and what did you do when she was sent your way? Did you talk to her? Did you grieve her fate? Did you let your servants _torture_ her for an eternity?"

"Stop." His brother's voice is a snarl, a broken growl. "Just - _stop_."

There is something that breaks between them as their eyes meet again, something long frozen that thaws and Michael has to look away, doesn't care if it makes him weaker. 

He's always been. 

Always the cautious one, the controlled bore, the dry observer to Lucifer's fiery passion. Someone to step aside, hold back, rein in. Back when the universe was new and smelled of stardust and dark matter, it had been a strength, his being a hard, unforgiving virtue. After the war, there were scarcely any virtues left, at least not near him. 

"It was _our_ rebellion, Michael," Lucifer says, hoarsely, voice strained. The harsh vulnerability reminds Michael of Father, of how his brother had sounded when they met again, after an eternity apart. Wounded, incredulous, wide-open. It's not a reaction he _wants_ , it twists in his chest. "That moment when you arrived with the Host…"

His voice trails off; Michael knows what he wants to say. He knows the moment, its exact contours and shades. The relieved surprise in Lucifer's voice. _I'm so glad you're here, brother. I didn’t want to start without you._ His brother's look, his determination and anticipation that slowly and overwhelmingly had stiffened into cruel knowledge. 

Michael had never arrived to help the rebels. 

He had come with an army at his back to drive out the other half of him, forever destroying a slice of his own power. 

He had not wanted a war, had wished to wield his heavenly sword against enemies, not brothers and sisters. 

Not that anyone fucking _asked_. 

Afterwards, after Sandalphon, ever the loyalist, had nearly torn off his right wing and cut every bit of muscle in his back as a parting gift, Michael had limped back to the Silver City to find their celestial justice in full bloom. Only it hadn't felt like it, it had merely felt like ashes.  
  
Afterwards, the storms died down and everything reshaped itself but certain things got helplessly frozen, grief turning into unalterable law.  
  
Hell, boiling with the lightbringer’s rage and guilt. 

The crushed, twisted part of Michael’s right side, immutable as the events leading up to it. The blood of angels on his hands, the mercy of Heaven out of reach.

How they fell, both of them, from whatever grace that had held them up before.

He's so tired of being fallen. 

He's so fucking _tired_.

"It wasn't our rebellion, Lucifer. It never was. You just didn't listen."

Michael catches his own reflection in the window and almost shudders at the sight; somewhere in his mind, even after all these years, he's still whole. 

And he walks away with the same hopeless darkness in his chest as he had back then, the same crippling lack of triumph.

  
  


*

  
  


He hides, pathetically, in the flashing lights and roaring crowds of Lux.  
  
Not because he’s welcome there - and not really because he’s _not_ , either - but because the afternoon has drained him to a point of embarrassment and because there’s a vindictive, cruel part of him that refuses to remove himself from his twin’s life without a fight. _This time, I make the choices, Samael._

"Oy, you're a mess.” A familiar voice next to him, a scent of grapefruit and sweat and alcohol mingling into the air. Ella Lopez, of all the fucking people in this city. But he guesses it makes as much sense as anything else: him being stuck here, grounded from Heaven, grappling at the threads of his own powers like a damn mortal. 

“So are you.” Michael stares at the bottom of his glass, focusing on anywhere but here. He’d smashed his left hand into a wall outside, as though it would be impossible to emerge from a brotherly fight about the very foundations of their existence without being visibly hurt. “But who’s counting.”  
  
“ _Hey_.” She makes a noise that might be amused or just offended. Maybe both, she strikes him as someone who can take it. And the glace in her eyes tells him she’s far from sober so all of her edges are softened. “I’m not the one bleeding.”  
  
His knuckles are raw and scraped and there’s a cut in his palm but it’s hurting less since he’s downed what must be two full bottles of vodka. Even angels get a brief buzz from that much liquor in a short amount of time and he intends to savour it. Not get stray pity from humans.  
  
"It's nothing. It'll heal in a little while." He sighs as she scrunches up her face like she's doubtful and will spend the next hour drowning him in scientific - or the human version of science anyway - question about angelic powers and stamina, self-healing wounds and father knows what else. 

"Can I-"

"No." He leans back immediately at the suggestion, moves his hand out of reach; it’s a motion built from instinct and experience, eons of repelling everyone with his warped powers. "Let's not do that."

"Okay.” Miss Lopez nods, a little twitch to her mouth. “Totally cool."  
  
He takes another gulp of vodka, lets it burn in his mouth for a moment before swallowing.  
  
Damn humans. Damn _this_ human. She’s entirely too unaffected anyway, most people would have left by now, picking up on the discomfort and worry in the air around him and removed themselves before Michael can poke at their terrified little minds.   
  
“It’s just - you touch me and-”  
  
“You can sense my fears. Yeah, Lucifer told me.”  
  
Of course he did. Michael is about to say something scathing about that but she is quicker, picks up her own trail of conversation before he opens his mouth.  
  
“You’re bleeding. And I’ve got bandages right here.” She pats her bag - purse? backpack? he’s not sure what stupid terminology these creatures uses for the many types of bags they’ve invented - and smiles briefly.  
  
There’s something disarming buried in the fact that she doesn’t seem to be bothered by him. He finds it _ridiculous_ and possibly disconcerting that even those powers are tilted, that things that he’s taken for granted forever could be fading. And even so, there’s a gasp of furious relief, a cracked palette full of conflicting impulses.  
  
Forever is a goddamn long time, that’s for sure.  
  
Ella holds his gaze, testing him. He exhales, spins his glass with his weak hand and lets the hurt one rest on the bar again. A rivulet of blood has dried into his skin, fresh blood is still oozing from the unclosed wound. It had been excruciatingly stupid. Furthermore it had been classic Samael, hurting himself when there’s no suitable target around. Not a parallel Michael was going for.  
  
“You carry first aid with you to a place like this?” he asks, averting his gaze from his own self-inflicted misery.  
  
“Well, this _is_ Lux.” She makes a facial expression that indicates that he ought to know precisely what she refers to. He doesn’t but since it’s his brother’s place he can guess. “Also - this chica has four stupid brothers _and_ works with cops.”  
  
She’s friendly, which is always odd. His worn-out mind immediately tries to understand her angle. 

"And now you're what?” He gives her a long, scrutinizing glance. “Fishing for lost causes?"

That stings, he can tell. 

"What's that to you?" Oh, but that’s defensiveness in her otherwise friendly voice, he notes. Just a touch, enough for him to know there’s more underneath. 

He shrugs. "Nothing, really. Just wondering what's wrong with you."

It's muddled even to him why he keeps going; it’s like a hell loop.  
  
Ella leans in, for a second her forehead is almost touching his and he thinks _why isn’t she afraid_ , thinks of citrus and smoke, thinks of the game they’re playing and its strange, unknown odds. Maybe humans do this all the time but he never gets close enough to find out. 

"Okay, here's the thing, _Michael_. You don't know me, you don't scare me. And angel or not - _so help me_ _God_ \- you have not earned the right to be an asshole to me." For a moment he sees the woman who hit him with a shoe, a flash of anger in her eyes as he feels something behind her walls shift. "I don't care what _your_ problems are so you're gonna leave mine alone."  
  
Okay, he admits, stifling an amused snort. He almost genuinely likes this one. She’s _scrappy_. Reminds him of Remy at her best, least one-track-minded behaviour. And _so_ full of intriguing, multi-layered darkness. He could learn a lot about mortals by studying her, he decides, temporarily refraining from following the traces of grey and black into the bright light that is her being. The high-functioning ones are the best subjects.  
  
 _You sure that’s all there is, Mikey? You sure you’re not starting to appreciate the mortals?_  
  
“Sure.” Michael nods curtly and finishes his drink.  
  
“Good,” Ella replies and holds up her hand towards the man behind the bar. “Two rounds of tequila, Julian!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Next time:** Ella POV and tequila.  
> Thanks for reading, I really appreciate it!


	4. Tequila talkin'

  
When you learn that God's angels walk around in LA, having tequila with one of them suddenly doesn’t seem too weird.  
  
Okay, it’s a little weird.  
  
Okay, a _lot_ weird. But so is the rest of her life.  
  
The evening has been like all others, lately: too short and too long at the same time, full of glances over her shoulder, empty of that quietude she had lost and found again and now probably would have to admit she's lost - _re-lost -_ if she'd allow herself to think about it for too long. It’s getting complicated keeping track of everything even with full-on delusions and tequila shots working their mojo.  
  
If she goes out these days, Ella normally people-watches in a crowded bar a few blocks from her apartment, sips her drinks while making up stories about the other customers on the fly. She likes that, it makes her feel part of a complex pattern, connected to the rest of the city.  
  
Tonight had felt more like a Lux night.  
  
 _Tribe night_ , she had hoped but then Charlie got a cold and Trixie had a thing for school and Maze is doing whatever it is that demons - freaking _demons,_ Ella's not entirely cool with this just yet - are doing when they go AWOL. 

It’s a little stitch in her thoughts still, spotting someone who looks so much like Lucifer yet nothing like him at the same time. It’s like he’s wearing a different body and it doesn’t fully fit. Like a secondhand dress that you buy because you totally mean to fix it - adjust the length or let the seams out around the waist but then in the end you don’t because life’s too short.  
  
It’s even stranger to talk to him, to hear his voice that sounds off and his words that are angled wrong except of course it isn’t and they’re not. 

And she keeps talking to him because at some point it will all - the night when he appeared, the motel room, the faded glow around those wings and the tarnished cruelty in his behaviour - start making _sense_. Won't it? 

“So,” Ella says, nodding towards the injured hand. “How does that work? Do you heal up like right now? Is it like a healing spell or a built-in kolto tank or what? Shouldn’t it have healed already?”

Michael rubs the bridge of his nose; she notices that his hand is slightly unsteady. There’s something the matter with his entire right side, she remembers from the hotel room, how even the wing had been wonky. 

“Why do you care?” he asks. It’s fascinating to her that a smarmy voice like his can sound so _harsh_.  
  
“Scientist, remember?”  
  
He gives her a glance over his shot of tequila. “Right. _Scientist_.”  
  
She can't hold back a chuckle. He's so impossible that it's almost disarming although she's learned from Chloe that he's definitely not harmless. _He gets_ _inside your head; he figures_ _out all your_ _weak spots and strikes._ She tries to sharpen her senses as best she can, even with the alcohol buzzing in her bloodstream.  
  
“I’m tired,” he admits, eventually. “So it takes longer.”

How long, she wants to ask. How long and how _come_ ? What else affects it, how much, where is it made, what is he, _truly_ ?  
  
What she wouldn’t give to write all of this down. Set up a database and stuff it with notes and tests and run scenarios. Even in a place like Lux, surrounded by dancing and drinking, that’s where part of her brain is, swirling around like a little ballerina at the idea of poking around in the unknown. 

"Well, I've seen your twin nearly die in this club. And then he tells me he’s immortal.” She shakes her head, thinking it will remain the strangest thing for a long time yet, being friends with the Devil. Remembering things that had verged on the absurd, glimpses and pieces that she had forced herself to repress because she promised herself as much in Detroit, well, long before that really. To be sane. Fully functional human being. To not let anyone down again. “Which means I’ve got questions. Intriguing minds want to know.”  
  
A half-muffled groan emerges from behind Michael’s glass.

“Well, as you can imagine, Lucifer is a _special_ case,” he mutters. "Story of his life."

Ella chuckles again.   
  
“Oh man, tell me about it. My youngest brother - totally the drama queen of the family.”  
  
“Sounds familiar,” he says, the dryness in his voice as vast as the Mojave Desert.  
  
And the thing is, she can totally imagine that it _is_ familiar, no matter how much she loves the man that is this angel’s brother. Her own brothers make her want to tear limbs from their screaming bodies at times, make her want to bang her fists against the wall and scream. Which is exactly what Michael seems to have done tonight if that hand of his is anything to go by.  
  
And the thing is, she would really like to know a lot of things that she suspects Lucifer wouldn’t tell her that maybe his twin would reveal. Things that he thinks would be too dark or upsetting, things that he doesn't want her to know about him. _I never lie_ , he says but he spares people from the truth way too often for that to be true. There’s a softness in him that she definitely doesn’t feel in Michael, a protectiveness that melts her anger. At least it used to. 

After these past few months she can’t stand the thought to be spared from anything.  
  
If the new lab guy with hipster beard and sweet abs is a serial rapist who gets off on bleeding women to death or sharing revenge porn online, she wants to know. 

If this cranky dude is a dangerous avenging angel from Heaven, she wants to know. 

If he can, which it had felt like in that back alley, tug at secret fears inside her and pull them into the light, she wants to _know_. 

After the first round of shots Ella stretches out in her seat and leans back. The dance floor is full, the bar is like a colorful safety blanket made of people and her head is finally becoming a gentle place to be. 

At first Michael looks at everything but her. He’s glaring at Julian behind the bar who bats his glittering fake lashes in their direction, probably hoping for the old Lucifer to take him upstairs; he’s studying something at the back of his own hand, fidgeting with his discarded gin or vodka glass. She wonders if he's bored, if that’s what the angels are down here, rolling their eyes at silly humans; she wonders if that’s why Lucifer has filled all of his hours with people and music and sex; she wonders how much of Michael’s time as Lucifer that had been a show and if there are details that weren’t, that were all _him_. 

“The work,” he admits then, grudgingly, scratching the nape of his neck. This time he does look at her, fixing her with his stare in a way that sends shivers down her spine. It's not pleasant, it's too intense for that, but it's not exactly unpleasant either.  
  
"So you mean that those times when you popped into the lab to actually _help…_ "

She had _liked_ that, too, she thinks now, feeling oddly embarrassed. She had appreciated the change of pace. Lucifer’s always been a frequent visitor, standing there with his phone, listening to her go on about stuff he finds _absolutely tedious but do go on, Miss Lopez because you are not_ . And he has always seen her in a way that resonates with her, _moves_ her, so she forgives his absent-minded attention and his temporary bouts of forgetting about her existence because they’re friends and that’s what friends do. Then suddenly, this newly returned Lucifer had leaned over her desk, looking at the test results and numbers and made suggestions, pointed out inaccuracies and patterns and there had been a calm fascination in his face when he did, like he’d found something valuable. 

"Lucifer doesn't?" Michael asks and there's a smugness in his voice that reminds her of her brothers. _Rico fucked up and I didn't, not for a whole year, where’s my parade?_ This guy is such an aggrieved sibling. Except on a celestial scale. Which, yeah, totally messy and probably lethal. 

"In his own way," she says, sensing a pang of guilt for selling out Lucifer without really meaning to. “But geeking out over test results isn’t really his thing, no.”

“I knew something must have given me away.” His expression tells her that they've always competed and that Michael has never won. Like, _ever_. It should probably make her like him more, feel for him, but it doesn’t. He’s too sharp for sympathy, his edges too jagged. “But I had counted on Chloe being too afraid to lose her precious Lucifer to dare question me about any inaccuracies.”

“You don’t know much about Chloe Decker then.” Ella downs another tequila shot, grimacing both at the topic and the suddenness of the liquor hitting her. How much has she had in total? At Lux, where money means nothing, the numbers all tangled into a puddle of booze. “Good for us. Also - that’s freaking _terrible_.”  
  
Michael chuckles but he doesn't sound amused, just exhausted. “Never said it wasn’t.”

He drinks like Lucifer, she thinks, watching him finish his round. Greedily, easily, treating every hard liquor like water. There had been a time when she was convinced Lucifer was a _miraculously_ high-functioning alcoholic in deep denial but like _so_ many things that, too, has been explained recently.  
  
By this sour angel, of all creatures.  
  
She’s about to order more drinks when the guy she had been casually flirting with earlier spots her across the room. Her pulse flutters under her skin, heart pounding. His name is Jeremy or possibly Jesse - the music had been loud and his mouth had been so damn _nice_ that she couldn’t help imagining it in all kinds of NSFW places - and he had nodded towards the exit in an ancient, unsubtle move. It had been the sight of what Ella hoped was Lucifer that had made her snap out of it.  
  
Now the guy’s headed her way again, a slight smirk in place and with _just_ that right touch of arrogance that renders her an incoherent mess of desire.   
  
But she doesn’t do that. Not anymore.  
  
 _Nope_.  
  
Even if she’s drunk and all her sense has vacated there’s a memory of someone in her body, a scent of musky aftershave and minty toothpaste and hair gel and promises, a shape of misinterpreted enthusiasm and _you’re amazing Ells, how come you don’t know that_ and she fights back, with everything she has, everything that still belongs to her. She battles her own impulses, drowns them in self-defense, in Michael’s tweed jacket as her arm desperately comes around his waist and she leans in, fake laughter like a sharp knife between them. She clutches him, holds him like she would someone she wanted, holds him until Jeremy or Jesse looks away; there's a shift in the room then, in _her_ when the distrust in her own self-restraint drowns in the vague, trickling sense of fear that Michael’s immediate closeness awakes in her. He smells of hand sanitizer and gin as well as some deeper, stranger notes she can’t place and his body is warm and sturdy in an almost distracting way. At her initial touch he freezes, a piece of stone in her arms but then, as the surprise fades, she can feel him square his shoulders and relent, slowly, like he’s been holding his breath. A fleeting, drunken thought: _he's_ _not used to being touched._  
  
“What the-” he snaps, then his gaze meets hers and she can tell that he finds something there, something painful and _twisted_ , just as she’s disentangling herself.  
  
“That - yeah, sorry about that. Long story.” Ella averts her gaze, noticing that she still has her hand on his arm. Her fear is rising but not as quickly as she would have thought, as if he's holding it off, or absorbing it. Is he? _Can_ he? The desire for that database is real, she thinks and inhales, sharply, before removing her hand. “There was a guy. Didn’t want to deal with him.”  
  
He arches an eyebrow. “You mean fuck with him?”  
  
“Sure, if you need it spelled out.” Maybe angels do. Maybe this angel does. Or maybe he's petty enough to want to torment her with her own mistakes. “I didn’t want that, no.”  
  
For a brief moment a glimpse of emotion flashes in his gaze but then he looks at her and his eyes are completely neutral again. 

“Why not? Did someone break your little heart?” he asks, coolly. 

There’s something of Lucifer in him, otherwise he wouldn’t have seen _that_ , wouldn’t have looked for it.  
  
There’s something of Lucifer in him, _oh_ she can tell, but the threads are twisted and broken, the light deflected. Whatever made him that way has done a thorough job. 

The same, she guesses, could be said for her.

She lowers her gaze, looks down at her hands: the right one that had hid the tranquilizer, that had managed to come up around Pete’s side, traveling like a lover’s touch and using his own weapons against him. The left one that had pushed him away, pushed her free.  
  
Or whatever it is she is supposed to be now.  
  
Ella Lopez with her disastrous taste in men. Nothing new under the sun, except everything is. 

There are lines and she’s never crossed them before, in fact, she's been _good_ at it, been proud of it. 

Whatever guilt and shame she has ignited in herself about numbers, preferences, patterns, even _positions_ , the truth is that her luck has not been worse than many other women’s. There have been one or two miserable idiots, she’s the first to admit that, but mostly there’s just been fleeting passion, confused constellations and a whole lifetime of keeping them all at a safe distance.  
  
Ella knows that some girls fall in love with gratitude and for fun, some fall in desperation; she falls in love against every good intention and always _not really_ , hesitating on the brink, running in the opposite direction.  
  
She’s always had her own back. 

Julian serves them another couple of rounds of shots and she downs one without looking up, avoiding Michael’s gaze on purpose. 

Did someone break her little heart? Had she really allowed him to do that?  
  
Oh, _fuck_ no. If her heart is broken it has been for longer than she cares to think about. That wasn't Pete, he didn't earn that. 

A shudder through her body, another serving of tequila like fire down her throat.  
  
Her work doesn't really lend itself well to illusions about good and evil. People are people, potentially awesome, potentially monsters. The guys her hormones seem to steer her towards aren't any more likely - probably less, actually - to beat a woman to death than that impeccable dude in the suburb who was such a great neighbour _and did you know he went to_ _Yale?_ Shit, the number of cheating, abusive, jealous men in fancy suits, hiding behind money and reputation, the sheer _mass_ of them in their investigations. In the big picture and the long run they overshadow the burglaries and drug possessions, the petty thefts and cybercrimes. 

Sure, she's got an ex-con radar like you wouldn’t _believe_ but life is about second chances and the Big Guy definitely is. Besides, the most dangerous men are always the ones you'd least expect, even kids know that.  
  
So why hadn’t she, when it actually mattered?   
  
Pushing the wallowing aside, she glances at Michael again. _There is darkness in you, Ella_ and he can feel it too, she knows he can. She downs another shot before she dares to look into his eyes and at that point, the world blurs.  
  
“Damn it,” she mutters, mostly to herself.  
  
It's that _wall_. The thick, concrete wall that follows the swirling, fog-headed phase where life is just so damn great and nothing hurts. Now, everything’s a grey sluggish blob of unease and even in her head, the words slur and shatter. 

Leaning her forehead in her hands, she feels herself drift away.

  
  
*  
  
  
  


It's the honking cars and neon lights that tell her she's outside again, the fresh air prickling her damp skin.

Fresh air and a body around her own, tall and firm and unfamiliar in a familiar way.  
  
“What’s happening?” she asks, squinting to read the surroundings.  
  
“I’m trying to get you home.” He steers them down the street - up the street? Are they walking at all? His injured hand is firm around her upper arm and she’s too drunk for fear, too drunk to _care_.  
  
“There are Ubers, you know.”  
  
He snorts. “Yeah, like I’m going to pay some insipid stranger to drive you to the wrong address. And then get charged _again_ for when you throw up three bottles of tequila all over the fake leather seats.”  
  
She chuckles against the tweed of his jacket. It smells faintly of fabric softeners and after shave which feels so solid and human, like this man is not an angel at all, merely a washed-up academic in grandpa clothes. “Why are you even doing this? You’re an _asshole_.”

He makes a noise that sounds suspiciously like a laugh, only brief and dark and suppressed, like he’s not going to give her that. Fair enough, she supposes. 

He really _is_ an asshole. A prying, fear-mongering asshole which is so far from what an angel is supposed to be that her mind completely turns over at the thought, generously helped by tonight’s drinks.  
  
"I can walk on my own you know-" she makes an effort to remove his arm from around her shoulders but he tightens the grip instead; getting a little frustrated, she wriggles even more and he curses under his breath. A flash of fear shoots through her then, as if he’s losing some of his control. 

"Even if you could walk - which you _couldn’t,_ by the way- you can't fly, now can you?" he asks in a clipped tone.

"Bah, a la _mierda_ ," she says, eyes wide and almost hurting from the effort of trying to see if he's telling the truth. But it's dark and fuzzy and so very, very _late_ . 

"You're the _weirdest_ angel," she says, deciding it’s better for her general sanity if she doesn’t look down, focusing instead on her unwilling company for the evening. "Dude, it's so messed up that you're Lucifer's brother and he's so nice, like _perfect_ , and you're… _this_."

"I met a ghost once," she says, feeling that rein slipping out of reach, all sorts of things pouring through the cracks. Feeling, too, that it doesn't matter. Why does it matter? All this damned self-control and for what? Pete? Babysitting Charlie? Getting blind drunk with the Angel of Fear because nobody else sticks around? _No_. Screw normal. "She even had a name. Rae-Rae. _Super_ weird. Almost got me a long vacation at a psychiatric ward. You're not going to mess with my head like that, are you?"

"No," he says and she wishes she could believe it.  
  
“Oooh,” she says, tapping her finger against his broad chest. “Can I have a feather? For the lab? Yeah, okay sorry, is that even the correct terminology? I mean, you do talk about angel wings like you’d talk about bird wings? Or is that heretical? Are they like an ethereal image of your soul? Oh, that would be so - wait- sorry, buddy, yours are all wrong, aren’t they?"  
  
“You look _nothing_ like Lucifer,” she says and shivers a little in the cold air. “How can that be when you have the same face, huh?”

"Hey, it's almost healed now." Ella lets a fingertip touch the newly formed scab on his knuckles, the jagged shape across the back of his hand. Lets her hand remain there, covering him the way his body covers hers. 

Michael says something she can't hear or doesn't understand; his wings are darkening the sky around them and now she's definitely not looking down because there's a skyscraper beneath her and _holy mother of_ \- no, she decides, no fear. Ella Lopez is done with fear.   
  
And then, she falls asleep to the sound of clouds opening and closing around them. 

  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
She dreams of flying and wakes up parched as the sun creates squares on her sheets. Her studio apartment is stuffy and too-hot, her body aches with thirst and cravings and she sits up, grimacing at the general state of her, well, _life_.

At least the bedroom is tidy, she realises, blinking to make sure it’s the actual truth. It is. Her boots are neatly lined up against the wall and her leather jacket hangs over a chair. The bag she had brought is placed on her beside table and her phone is charging.  
  
No night at Lux has ever ended in such meticulous order, that's for damn sure.

Last night is a distorted echo but she remembers tequila. And talking. _Quite_ a lot of talking about things she doesn’t let herself think too closely about right now. Maybe never. Never is _good_.  
  
Last night is a distorted echo but the scent of ozone and rain lingers, as does the distant sound of wings.  
  
  



	5. Catalyst

"You know, when I lost my wings", Amenadiel says, infuriatingly slow and thoughtful, stressing each word and leaning forward so his elbows are planted on each side of his double frappuccino vanilla whatever. “I was devastated. I knew it was my fault somehow, but I didn't know, didn't _understand,_ what I could do to change it.”

Michael pours his second bag of brown sugar into his regular coffee and watches it disappear under the surface, melting.  
  
“Riveting stuff,” he says, looking up at his older brother. How has Lucifer put up with this bullshit for _years_ ? “Are you writing a self-help book? I’m sure there’s a market for it in the Silver City.”

"No, Michael, I'm saying that I understand your situation." 

It's funny how they all do. Eons of time seem to have erased what sporadic memories they once might have formed about the rebellion, its turmoil and inevitable aftermath. In Heaven, he can't remember anyone trying to understand anything, least of all why someone would be forced to take certain harsh measures to prevent a disaster of cataclysmic proportions. _That’s because you turned the heavenly host against your brother,_ Lucifer reminds him in his memory. _It was considered_ _overly cruel even for an arse like you._ But even before then, long before, Michael had been living in his own solitary confinement. 

"Oh, is that so?" He hears his voice as if observing it all from a slight distance. The coffee tastes stale despite the nervous girl behind the counter claiming it was _freshly made, sir, and please have a pleasant day_ as though that, too, was part of his order. “I guess that’s your special gift.”  
  
“Well, I wouldn’t go that-” Amenadiel cuts himself off, making a tired face. “You’re just mocking me.”  
  
“You _think_?”

Around them people go about their daily little lives, unaware. Most of what takes place in this dimension and beyond is unknown to these creatures and a majority of them wouldn't even want to know, even if they could. 

Chloe Decker would. Ella Lopez, too. 

He looks down at the coffee again, taking another mouthful. 

Those two humans are the ones he's spent most time with, he supposes it's only reasonable that they're also the ones he finds himself comparing the rest to, placing them side by side in his neatly organised mind. Lucifer's precious Gift from God and the talkative so-called scientist, quite a pair. Michael shakes his head.

Amenadiel looks at him, not quite as patient anymore. His true temper rests just beneath the surface, Michael knows, regardless of what else that might have changed about him. The sharp claws of God's most obedient little warrior, spotlessly devoted even in his self-imposed exile. A while ago, back when Michael first arrived in LA, he had wondered how the humans had managed to domesticate his brothers. Then he had quickly realised it's entirely voluntary on their part. So much for upholding the separation of the divine and the mortal, he supposes, so much for _anything_ Father once taught them. 

"You know, I wish you would stop doing that.”

“What, thinking? I’m afraid I can’t. It’s a design flaw. Terribly inconvenient around people like you, brother.”  
  
"Pushing everyone away." His older brother leans forward again, almost as if reaching for Michael across the table. "You and Lucifer, you’ve always done it, both of you. It's…"

He lets the sentence drift off and rubs his forehead. 

"Another design flaw." Michael completes the sentence for him and finishes his coffee. The sugary bitterness lingers in his mouth for hours. 

*

Up on the roofs in the shittier parts of town, Michael has learned, he’s a bit more free to use the world as a testing ground for his Creation, such as it is now. Apart from the traffic and the noise, he can almost pretend to find the crisp focus that Silver City offers, although the caution needs to be greater here, the range infinitely smaller. 

There’s a movement through the air as he raises the energy he’s made to spark in the universe, created to create - painstakingly these days, nothing like the effortless flow of ages past - to maintain and shape order and symmetry. _The world is a puzzle where the center pieces are missing,_ Gabriel had said, self-importantly and with great pathos, after his last visit. Michael uses the contrived metaphor, wills it to live between his mind and his power. He is the catalyst at the heart of the world.  
  
 _And what a catalyst you are, Mikey!_

The sound of wings breaks his concentration, as does the familiar voice with its ridiculous accent. "Any progress on your impotence?" 

Michael loses the hold of the matter he's managed to entwine into… _something_. It shatters dully, landing on the roof between them.

"Ah," Lucifer's gaze follows the process, the corners of his mouth twitching. Oh how he must enjoy this part, Michael thinks. In fact, all of it is a perfectly fitted pun of the sort his twin's inferior intellect often finds remarkably funny. Banal innuendo and badly crafted puns. No wonder he likes it down here where the minds are base and brutal and nourished by reality television and mobile games. "I see."

They'd use their powers for fun, once upon a time. Lucifer would take the dark matter and stardust and turn it into magnificent threats that Michael avoided by letting his hands full of nothing become walls, waves, enormous mountains made of stars. He'd throw shapes at Lucifer whose alteration of them would surprise him every time. His brother has always been the most creative, pushing further, demanding change where others are content with unchanging beauty. 

Recently, the only times they've tested their force on one another, are when they're fighting. It's not the same, the outlines completely different and they pay with exhaustion and sorrow rather than contentment and awe. 

Michael clenches his hands.

"So, any news about the Endless?"

"Not yet." Lucifer adjusts his cuff links, finally unfolding his damn peacock wings again. For someone who's tried to get rid of those things - chopped them, burned them, drowned them, Michael had watched it in absolute horror, feeling the phantom pains in his own brokenness - he's really fond of their effect. Or perhaps that’s just in his presence, to preen and taunt. _Look how shiny they are, glowing with God’s grace and mercy, what about yours, eh?_

"I heard there was a case that might be related-"

"Leave the cases to the Detective and me," Lucifer cuts him off and Michael snorts. Amenadiel had told him about it, just in passing, the way he leaves information for them these days. A few details for Michael, a few of Michael’s whereabouts for Lucifer - their big brother’s very own little angel network. He supposes Chucky isn’t interesting enough to keep an angel entertained twenty-four seven after all. 

"Or you could let me help." Michael doesn't particularly _want_ to; he wants his twin to at least consider it. 

But of course he won't.

“Help?” Lucifer makes an incredulous sound. "When have you _ever_?"

And isn't that the truth, Michael thinks. A selective, slightly grotesque spin on truth but a truth nonetheless. For someone like Lucifer it surely must seem like most of them do not, in fact, help or go about their business. Not everyone has to make a whole damn show about putting things in order or doing one's duty. Some do what they’re supposed to or _think_ they are supposed to for eons and eons of time only to end up grounded. Some throw a fit and storm off with a bang and spend an eternity rebelling against the punishment of the original rebellion, simply refusing to learn from mistakes.  
  
He was left with Heaven, their disarrayed home, the shambled Host. He was left with the leftover fury, the uprooted seeds of rebellion, all the useless fractions of their ideals and dreams that Michael had no idea what to _do_ with apart from quelling them, putting them to an uneasy rest. Flatten the uprisings, nullify the remaining threats.  
  
It had brought out the absolute worst in him, just as he can imagine Hell had done to his brother.  
  
 _The worst - or the truth?_ Uriel had asked, a long time ago.  
  
Michael doesn't know the answer. He’s fairly sure Lucifer doesn’t either, not even now. 

When their eyes meet he can see his own frustration and exhaustion deflected back at him and for a moment it subdues the bitterness, alters the desolate fury of this lifelong sentence.  
  
Then his twin brother leaves and Michael cracks the unquiet air behind him with whatever is left of his wretched powers.  
  


*

  
  


Five hours later, Ella opens the door to her apartment with a surprised frown on her face. She’s wearing big glasses and colorful pajama pants and when she notices it’s him, she runs a hand through her hair and squints her eyes. Her expression is confused, hesitant, even the slightest bit fearful. The air tastes of her mortal little terrors before he pushes them away and for the billionth time in his merciless existence Michael catches himself wishing he could ignite something else, for someone, just once.  
  
“Oh no,” she says, looking over his shoulder. “Did something terrible happen?”  
  
  
  
*  
  
  


"So let's see what your supposed science can do," Michael summarises his case a little while later, sitting in a cramped couch full of assorted colorful pillows. One is supposed to be a robot of some kind, another has the slightly distorted face of Jesus wearing a peace sign, God _help_ him. Overall the room feels like it’s about to attack, send him off in a flurry of nerdy knick-knacks and plants. 

Ella had seemed intrigued but conflicted as he went over the failing energies bit, looked downright thrilled at the idea of doing a study of angelic powers and then he might have lost her around the prospect of trying to assess whatever it is that goes wrong, because she gives him a long, searching glance.

"Meaning you need me? Despite the five minute lecture on everything I get wrong I’m the only one in this city with the skills to help you?"

She grins but it doesn't render her words any less obnoxious or her unwillingness any less of a fact, he assumes.

"I wasn't saying that.” He shakes his head, aiming to shrug but he is, frankly, in too much pain after a day of practice and well, _life_ , and regrets the attempt immediately, regrets _all_ of it. This had been a bad idea. Of course it had. His first five hundred usually are, just look at the fall of the damn Roman empire which, _technically_ , hadn’t been his fault but even so. “Don't flatter yourself."  
  
“Kinda hard to do that in your company, buddy.”  
  
“Well,” he says, grasping at a plan B. “Would you rather I lied? Because trust me, I can do that.”  
  
Her hands reach for a can of Pepsi that she’s been holding on to for his entire visit. She’s offered him one as well but he hasn’t touched it yet.  
  
"No," she says, simply and with emphasis. 

Michael observes her, trying to make sense of it all. The effect humans have on his brothers, on him, the strange ways in which Earth deconstructs his own talents and puts them back together again, it seems. 

The patterns of interacting outside of plans and protocol.  
  
He might not need her help but he would _like_ it. She’s brave and broken and there are a hundred interesting things about her particular brand of fear that he finds an intriguing enigma, the same way she seems to consider his powers a code to decipher. Perhaps that wouldn’t be a bad thing, right now. Unlike Lucifer, Michael doesn’t have a whole unholy court full of servants or favors to trade, he’ll have to find his own ways.  
  
Still unaccustomed to what does and does not scare this woman, he notices too late that the sudden sound of his wings unfurling has startled her.  
  
“You wanted a feather," he says, more gruff than he intended. 

“What - _yes_." She blinks. "Yes. You _remembered_. Should I just-”  
  
She narrows her eyes at him, a hint of a smile playing on her lips. Michael doesn't move. That damn smile scratches at the surface of whatever lie he’s keeping up here on Earth, it travels back to something that predates it all. As does her awed expression and careful movement as she’s approaching him and he bites back his regret about the entire thing when her hand, slow and loose-fingered, touches the tip of his right wing that’s half-useless and slumping in pain. He’s not God’s angel down here and not anymore, if he ever was. He’s just a spectacle, a broken myth but her very strange and very _human_ acceptance of it carries such weight he's unsure of how to endure it.  
  
Turns out he can’t.  
  
It hits him like a blow: it’s too intimate, too painful, it unsettles him and snakes through all defenses, signalling war. His wings are manifestations of the ancient grief that still sits in his body, the blinding rage wrapped around his back, the corrupted divinity that resides there. The hatred that is burning under his unblemished skin, travelling inward and outward, rolling off him in waves.   
  
“Let me do that,” he says, as casually as he can manage, using his left hand to pluck a feather that he holds out to her.  
  
“You okay?” Ella asks, before taking it and he realises he’s allowed himself a grimace of pain. 

“Splendid.”

"I'm serious though, I've got ibuprofen and heating pads." She's been staring at his shoulder but averts her gaze, suddenly polite. "I mean, I guess that wouldn't work so well for an angel, whatever, forget it."

There's a trace of something unreadable in her voice, softening it. The last thing he needs is pity from some clueless mortal, but he’s not sure that’s what she’s offering, not sure that’s what she _is_. Not really sure about anything when it comes to her. 

"It's fine," he says, going for a friendly tone which typically means it's coming out as insufferable. _Like you're trying to sell me shit I don't need, man,_ a young woman had told him weeks ago when he was trying to reason with her about the price for a rented car.

"You sure?"

"Yes." He shifts position, allowing his back to rest more comfortably against the back of the couch.  
  
Ella nods, dropping the subject. She looks instead at the feather, tilts her head, holds it between her thumb and index finger; in the light from the lamp in her window, it looks golden. It’s not. Nothing about him is.

Michael lets his gaze travel over the bookshelf in the other end of the small room. The only thing he regrets not doing in Lucifer’s sex dungeon penthouse is reading the entirety of the book collections there. Something tells him Ella might have more fiction and less original editions of philosophy and theology from half-mad figures of history. “So, the science. The part where you help me."  
  
"Oh that, yes. The feather was for that?"

"Sure."

"Lucifer usually just asks nicely,” she says, smiling. 

It moves inside his bones, the deep-seated discomfort from the comparisons, the measuring, in always and forever being _weighed_ against the angel that was created to be his equal but never actually _was_. Not once did anyone look at them without seeing the difference, the shift, the alignment of whatever matter they were made from. Lucifer bright and burning - Michael, base and deficient.  
  
Stuck here, in what feels like a bad imitation of Lucifer’s life even as he’s breaking it in for himself, pushing against its boundaries, it bothers him even more.  
  
Now, in particular.  
  
Of course he could manipulate Ella Lopez into agreeing to help him. Play her fears like Lucifer would play the dark notes of the galaxy and turn it into music that made Father want to give him the world.   
  
It would be a simple thing, in theory. 

But Michael is done. He's been twisting himself at every turn trying to uphold an ideal he fooled himself meant something to Father, working diligently and faithfully for a cause it appears no one actually believed in after all and now he's stuck here and he's _done_.  
  
“Bet he does. But I’m not Lucifer,” he says instead, like a twisted echo from another room, another woman. 

This one is darker, harder in a way and softer at the same time. There's faith and resistance and longing in her, a trace of reverence and a mouth full of cleverness. 

And like Chloe, she's constantly surprising him.  
  
“Oh, I know.” She looks at him for a while, those big eyes brimful of a glittery kind of amusement that seems to fade out, replaced by something he can’t discern but knows he wants more of, somehow, stupid as it might be. "I was just totally messing with you. So, when do we start?"

  
  



	6. CSI: Archangel

  
  


They start, as it turns out, by becoming co-workers.  
  
“It’s only _very_ briefly,” Lucifer states and Chloe nods with so much emphasis it almost gives Ella whiplash just looking at her.   
  
They start, as it turns out, by becoming co-workers on a _highly confidential_ case that requires secrecy to a degree where Ella feels like a jittery teenager, accused of breaking and entering whenever she moves around the precinct. Her nerves are frayed and every time Brimley or Cacuzza as much as greets her, she startles, battling the impulse to hide the supposed shoplifted goods in her hands behind her back.   
  
Despite that, things aren't as bad as she would have imagined. 

There had been a _moment_ when Michael got introduced as a forensic expert from New York, brought in to assist them. Lucifer had looked away then, eyes flashing in a way that Chloe had seemed to anticipate because she had calmed him down, snatched him away for something else. _Hey, we had to make a solid cover, it doesn't mean anything._ Now, a few hours later, they can almost walk together on a crime scene without being on the verge of the apocalypse. 

But overall, Ella thinks, the temporary situation isn't as volatile as it could have been.  
  
Sure, Michael wields his intelligence as a sword, slashing at his twin whenever he can - _do try to apply your intellect for once_ \- and Lucifer, in turn, walks at a pace that eventually leaves his brother wincing and far behind - _keeping up, Mikey?_   
  
"Well," Chloe says, pouring her fifth mug of coffee in just a few hours. "You know how it is."   
  
“Well,” Lucifer says, buttoning his Armani jacket. “No time to waste then. Let’s go and see if the outdoorsy yoga types were, in fact, killed by demons or just people with good taste and a fondness for knives.”  
  
  
  
*   
  


" _Well_ ," Linda declares at Lux, slamming down drinks for the entire tribe. "I'm not going to violate any client confidentiality, but you are in for a challenge. Oh, I could write a book."

“You _should_ write a book.” Maze balances a shot glass on her leather-clad knee, as well as a beer in one hand, scrolling on her phone with the other. She's back in the group, unsteadier than before but _there_ and Ella figures that if Chloe is okay with it, then so is she. “Cash in some royalties. Get yourself a nice little mansion.”   
  
“They haven’t broken the precinct yet.” Chloe weighs in. “I mean, they still _might_ , but...”   
  
“Yes,” Linda agrees. “ _Oh_ , yes.”   
  
Ella thinks about the bitterness in Michael’s eyes, the spite in Lucifer’s tone, the many ways in which she feels caught between two hurt little children and equally caught between the impulse to hug them better and smack their smug, pretty faces with her fists. Maybe a combination.   
  
Two drinks later, Lucifer has snatched Chloe away and Linda has begun an impromptu therapy session with a random visitor.   
  
Ella, of course, remains.   
  
"What did he promise you?” Maze gives her a searching glance, eyebrows raised and that stern look on her face that reminds Ella of teachers, headmasters, the security guards at the Moonbeam. There’s a chilly sense of misplaced authority there but also a trace of _care_. She's a little different since her last time off from LA - that Ella doesn’t ask about because she doesn’t want to _know_. But now she’s returned and she’s a little more cracked, like the rest of them. 

"Who?"

" _Michael_. What did you get in return for helping him?" She puts her drink down and sharpens her tone. "Did he threaten you?"

"What? Dude, no." Ella shakes her head. 

“Really?”  
  
“ _Really_.”   
  
"Right. Whatever. I'll be watching him, Ella."   
  
Maze probably should, she will give her that. And there’s no denying the concern for her - or determination not to let Michael win, she supposes - lands somewhere in Ella’s chest. Like most things with Maze it’s got rough edges; like most things in life, it’s real anyway. 

"Aw, you remember my name even when you’re drunk now?"

“Yeah.” Maze nods, downing the vodka. " _Growth_." 

  
  
*   
  


Ella has spent a good portion of her life imagining a wide selection of _what if_ scenarios. What if magic exists? What if you can hyper jump into space? What if we _can_ populate Mars? How would modern society put science fiction medicine to use? 

She has dreamed, theorized, and chatted about the possible within the realm of impossibilities. And now it's here - _he's_ here - in her lab and nothing among the preconceived notions truly fits. 

He stands there, grouchy and frowning at her suggestion that they should start by trying to determine what sort of effect his powers could have, how they’d work on someone like Ella. It’s a somewhat flimsy excuse for trying his powers on her, parse through the fear that she’s reliving almost every night, the idiotic memory of terror that she can’t rid her body of, no matter how many sessions she schedules with Dr Bryant.   
  
When she tells him that, finally, he rolls his eyes and takes a step towards her.   
  
“It’s still a terrible idea.” His mouth is thin and taut, his eyes darker than usual. She can taste the unwillingness in his voice.   
  
“See, I figured you’d say that-”   
  
“Because I know what my powers do. I live with them. They’re not like Lucifer’s little party trick, getting you hot and bothered.”   
  
“Well, I wouldn’t know-”   
  
“You mean he’s never used them on you? Ever? I find that very hard to believe.” He scoffs and there’s something so weary about his entire posture that her heart breaks a little for him. For _them_ , perhaps, because she doesn't think Lucifer feels so good either, not when it comes to his twin and whatever it is that broke between them. 

“Yeah,” Ella says, quietly. “I know.”   
  
He gives her a long, unreadable glance.   
  
"Anyway, it's not like _his_ thing at all. People see their desires in his eyes, bouncing back at them. In mine they see everything they spend their lives trying to forget." He exhales, sharply. "Fear makes you do awful things." 

"So does desire." She looks down at her hands, thinks about tapping her nails along the back of the Bible, thinks about running them along a stranger's spine, criss-cross patterns of lust and leftover tenderness and _want_. “Everything has the potential to be corrupted.” 

Their eyes meet; Michael looks like he’s about to protest against her definition of desire - or her general concept of _everything_ , more likely - but in the end he doesn’t.

"Fine. It's your loss," he mutters in a tone that makes it sound like that's not true at all. 

At first, there's absolutely nothing that motivates his reluctance. Ella stands in front of him, the way she's observed Lucifer and the subject of his interrogation technique over the years. A quick stab of annoyance and wounded pride still - _they didn't tell me_ \- but it's overshadowed by anticipation.

She feels Michael in the room. A thin layer of fear, a prickling unease. He’s not actually threatening, at least she has never read him that way. It's more like being worried about something too big for fixing, like the state of the world or the elections, an unease staying in your bones regardless of what you're doing to occupy your own thoughts. 

It can’t be all he is, she thinks, impatiently. It can’t be everything.   
  
“You’re holding back."

“No,” Michael says, sounding tired and unconvincing. Sounding exactly like Lucifer when he’s not willing to tell truths or divulge something he knows. For two such wildly different people, they sure behave the same way. “I’m not.”  
  
Ella folds her arms across her chest. “Let’s try again then.”   
  
This time, she stands with her back turned towards him instead. His hands rest - reluctantly and only after some convincing - on her shoulders. The warmth of him seeps into her, the closeness both soothing and worrying and he picks up on it, she can tell by the way he tenses, loosening the grip around her until his palms barely brush over her shirt. 

"You're keeping me out," he says, sounding mildly interested.

"I am? _Wow_. But you can force it down, can't you? I mean, you’re the angel of fear - and dude, I've _seen_ Lucifer with his mojo and-"

"Ella-"

"I _said_ I wanted to!"

She feels her own frustration in her throat, tightening it. There’s no good reason for this want, she knows it even as she argues for it; there’s no case here but she figures that if he can dig into whatever it is that sits in her chest, she can get rid of it, get out on the other side of it. Be free. 

He’s scowling. "This is - You have no _idea_ what I could do to you."

He probably hasn’t either.

But isn’t that just it, she thinks. You never know. Not really. You hope and you pray and you take all sorts of precautions but you never _know_.

In the end it's always about faith.

"Michael. _Please_."

He sighs, a deep, dark sound. Then his hands are back on her shoulders, as lightly as before, the presence of them a little spark inside her.   
  
It’s the same sensation at first, the low-key fear from before. She closes her eyes, tries to push away everything that might stand in the way and it seems to have an effect. 

Something changes, moves subtly around them. Ella feels a shiver pass through Michael, feels the hairs on the back of her neck stand up. 

And then, suddenly, his powers slam down on her mind and shatter all of her protests and defenses. It's such a force, such _might_ , that she shudders, shifting her weight as if she can escape it by moving around. Fear floods out of her at a frantic pulsating pace; it's like she's bleeding to death, or drowning, and she wants to turn around and grab hold of the nearest person except she can’t because it’s _him_ and he’s the source of it all. He stands there as all of her fears, every nightmare she had ever had, wearing the faces of her demons. The doctors pronouncing a potential diagnosis for her ghost-vision that had made her abuela cross her heart, the many different faces of priests listening to her choked confessions, the face of that cop in Detroit that almost crushed her dream pf escape because of one stupid, sloppy mistake, the distant, smiling gaze of Pete, the soul-crushingly disappointed face of God himself. _There is darkness in you, my child_.

"Please," she manages, shoving his hands away. " _Stop_."   
  
In a heartbeat, Michael steps away and the torment comes to an abrupt end. 

"See, I told you-" His gaze searches for her; she turns around but his voice trails off when she looks into his eyes. As he moves farther away from her he looks - for lack of a better word - _unhappy_. “You okay?”   
  
“No,” she admits, raking a trembling hand through her hair. Her forehead feels damp and her fingers are cold. “ _Shit_ , no, not really.” 

He sighs, even without looking up she can tell he’s headed for the exit. "Yeah, I'll get out of your way, it's-"

"No," Ella says, so suddenly she surprises herself. "I don't want - you don't have to do that. It's not your fault."

Something passes over his features at her words, a glimpse of something almost gentle and she thinks about how untouchable they are, Lucifer and his siblings, how ultimately they stand separate from everything else. How utterly at _fault_ they are, hard divinity where she is messy humanity. 

Ella looks at him and it feels like seeing him for the first time.   
  
"That's how people react if you… touch them?"

"If I don't control my powers yeah." His voice is even, detached, but Ella hears the spaces between the words, and feels the shades of regret around each syllable. 

"Dude, I'm so _sorry_."

"Don't be." Michael scoffs and whatever shift she could feel in him before it's gone the second she offers him sympathy. _Pity_ , she corrects herself. A fucked up guy like him can't tell the difference, she ought to remember this. "It's a gift from God, not your fault." 

The word _gift_ falls ripe and poisonous at her feet.   
  
  
  
*

  
  


The following day, demons are spotted in the same place as the outdoor yoga class had been held, just a few hundred metres away. 

"Don't tell me - there actually _is_ a Hellmouth in California?" Ella asks, grabbing her equipment as Chloe and the sour-looking twins stand by the lab entrance, the very embodiment of impatience. "Oh, come on, Buffy reference? Anyone?"

"Let's go." Chloe nods, letting all jokes pass unnoticed, her no-nonsense face firmly in place. 

Ella wonders what she's told Lieutenant Martin to get permission to bring both a random forensic scientist and no less than two consultants to this officially very loosely defined case. Or what she's _not_ telling him. But Chloe's probably used to the secrecy by now, just as the whole precinct is accustomed to her running her own little show and chalking up the clearance rates. _Decker does what Decker does, you know how it is._

She wonders, too, what she will do if she's attacked by demons. Freaking _demons_. Her presence feels unnecessary but there's strength in numbers and she doesn't want to complain now that she's finally in on the supernatural secrets. But _still_.

Then, as they arrive and things happen very fast, she forgets all of her questions. 

Amenadiel is there, because of course he is and there are creatures, with weird weapons and _faces_ and Ella snaps photographs of them, unsure what else she can do as Lucifer confronts them with Michael and Amenadiel flanking him, sending the attackers to the ground with what looks like just a flicker of their wrists. _Here_ , Michael says, holding up a whole string of demons mid-air without using his hands and Amenadiel, merely nodding freezes them there until all three of them smack the group of demons down into the concrete. 

Ella tries not to squeal. Or faint. 

It's just really cool. There's no way around that she's _terrified_ , but it's also, she must admit, really, really cool in an _oh shit this is better than TV_ sort of way. 

But then, screaming in a tone that chills Ella to the bones, the demons that have been scattered return in a sort of formation. A whole horde of them, bouncing back. She hears Amenadiel say something, sees Chloe empty her weapon and reload it; Ella drops the camera and shoots, too, and hits one of them but there are so many more than _one_. Even with three angels, it feels like an unfair fight. 

"I was under the impression that I told you to get _lost_ ," Lucifer snarls, tall and dangerous in the midst of the scene. He's really something else, yet so very much the same; the notion moves like an echo inside her mind. “Why do you never listen?”   
  
“Wild guess: you talk too much,” Michael snaps from behind him and Ella is inclined to agree given that the demons manage to send both twins off, sprawling into a bush. 

There’s some fighting that she fails to see the bulk of since Amenadiel snatches her out of harm’s way - _sorry about this_ , _Ella_ \- and dumps her on the roof of the public restrooms which, yeah, all in all it's the _opposite_ of a dick move even if it _feels_ like one. Just as she’s about to protest the noise below intensifies and she can hear Chloe scream Lucifer’s name. 

And then, from nowhere and everywhere at once, comes a sound that Ella can't recognise from anything she's ever heard. It's an otherworldly noise that slices through the air, both terrifying and peaceful. She can see a huge shape - a massive energy, like a thick shadow in the air - landing right in the middle of the horde of demons, smashing down on them like a gigantic blade and she can see Michael wielding it from a distance.   
  
Everything stops. 

A moment later, Lucifer gets to his feet, checking his right side where the jacket is torn apart by whatever it was that Michael had created. His skin is bared and unscathed which sends her sanity spiraling a little bit because God knows it takes longer than a couple of weeks to come to terms with the celestial presence in her life. 

It's all a blur, but she hears scraps of it. 

She hears Chloe’s relief at Lucifer’s strained joke: "Bloody hell, this is my best Armani."

She hears Amenadiel’s voice, full of something that almost sounds like love: “ _Brother_."   
  
She hears Michael scoff, before taking flight.

And she hears herself, a slight hitch of panic in her voice: “I’m still up here, guys.”

  
  
  
*   
  


  
The lab is late-night quiet. For a long spell back when her life was even more of a mess than it currently is, Ella had grown to love late-night quiet. Coffee and donuts and loud music; sometimes the security guards stopped by for a chat. She’d mix it up and spend half the nights of the week at work, the other half getting wasted somewhere. Balance in all things and all that.   
  
Now Michael sits by the computer she lets him borrow and by the look of things he’s studying maps of the city. Everything about him is tense and closed, his shoulders slumped in that way that looks so painful she instinctively wants to reach out and touch him, run a hand along his back. It’s a human impulse, she thinks, wondering if he _gets_ it or if it just frustrates him.   
  
“Hey,” Ella says.   
  
He nods, curt and stand-offfish but then again, when is he not. That thought makes her smile to herself as she puts her things down and turns on the tablet next to the laptop he’s using.   
  
"You okay?”   
  
“Uh-huh.”   
  
“Good.” She glances sideways at him, at the sharp profile and patched-up composure. "You saved his life. Before."

"What will you make of that, then?" His answer comes a little too quickly for neutrality. "Did I surprise you?"

"No," she says and he looks at her over his shoulder.

"Liar," he mutters but it's not as grouchy as she'd have expected. Maybe a master of deception can appreciate a little lie meant to make someone feel better. 

"Okay, a little then." She smiles. White lies aside, there's something about their interaction that makes her honest, tears apart her layers of Bubbly LA Lopez and wrings out the other versions of herself as well. 

Michael shifts in his seat, rubbing his right shoulder with his left hand. 

"I’ll go get something to eat,” she says, nodding at the neatly arranged work she has lined up since she was snatched away from her desk earlier. Hello overtime. "What do you want?"  
  
He’s quiet for so long she thinks he didn’t hear. But it tugs at memories with Lucifer, of returned questions - what do _you_ want, Miss Lopez? - and that sense of him not only being unused to a wide selection but of him not being used to having a choice at all.   
  
“Surprise me,” he mutters eventually, making her smile to herself on the way out.   
  
He gets a veggie combo with injera from a nearby food truck and eats it all, without commenting, which she guesses is almost like praise.   
  
And late-night quiet grows into a strangely soothing night-time.   
  



	7. Maremagnum

Last night, he had shaped weapons of protection from nothing but air.  
  
The sensation of matter forming and swelling, _bursting_ into a form is still a memory in his hands, an echo from a simpler time. The notions of it travel back to the creation of him, to the dawn of the universe, to the trace of achingly tired infinity in his bones.  
  
This morning - after a strange night at the precinct in the company of Ella - the only creation he can summon is a faint gasp in the air, barely enough to rustle a few leaves. 

He bites back a growl.

"Well, you're _clearly_ not powerless," Lucifer states, in a slightly accusatory tone that carries echoes from life in the Silver City. Reverence and silence and a thin, well-hidden stream of accusations that are softly prickling the heart of your very being. Well, if you’re Michael, at least. If you’re Gabriel or Raphael, it’s probably just an endless soft cloud of contentment at having fulfilled your purpose simply by existing. 

He looks at his twin, pinching the bridge of his nose. " _I_ never said I was."  
  
It’s the truth; Lucifer had assumed he was because his brother likes to assume these things. Just like he likes to assume cruelty for the sake of cruelty in his enemies as well as making Michael one in his mind. 

_If I wanted you dead, brother, wouldn’t I have killed you by now? Wouldn’t I have let father crush you?_  
  
Would he?  
  
“I don’t understand,” Lucifer complains.  
  
Michael tweaks the fabric of the stones in his hand, reshapes it into liquid form, then lets it vanish. He can't remember if he used to be able to do that, before. “You’re the one who’s been down here with Amenadiel testing out your self-actualisation powers for _years_ , why don’t you tell me why it doesn’t work?”

Lucifer paces, thinking with his entire being the way he does. Pulling at the threads of the universe to seek his solutions, as though every little thing he does needs to involve everyone else.  
  
“Aren’t you supposed to be the clever one? The one we should all look up to in awe?”

Michael snorts. "Look who's being cranky because he has to actually _fix_ the things he breaks for once."

A part of him, the small sliver of his mind that acknowledges that his twin _has_ been held responsible down in Hell thinks _this is unfair_ ; another part of him, the bitter, estranged angel of a God that barely speaks to him, that he all but destroyed himself to please, thinks _it could never be enough_.

He mends the pieces, haplessly, pushing back the vitriol to let out a deep sigh.

“There’s a tear here,” he says, forcing himself onto a different path than their usual. _Look how we grow, Father._ “In the park.”  
  
“You don’t say, Sherlock.” Lucifer kneels by the bushes where they had found demons, where the air is trembling and fractured, sewn together only in bits and pieces.  
  
That’s how Heaven had felt, too, all those eons ago. A torn fabric, a rupture.

 _Hellmouth_ , Ella had called it and, later last night over take-out dinner, proceeded to tell him about vampires and slayers; he'd listened with an attention that still surprises him, the names and inane plots surfacing with ease in his memory. He wonders if Earth has rubbed off on him, if this pointless knowledge has engulfed something else, and if it is typical for the human mind. It _would_ explain a lot.   
  
“There’s a way to mend it, temporarily.” Michael feels the reality shift against his consciousness, knows it must feel the same to his twin. It’s a prickling sensation, a slight disturbance at the corner of his existence - reasonably easy to ignore at will, but always there. Not for the first time since the war, he wonders how Lucifer’s powers act on Earth, around humans. Wonders how much of it that overwhelms him the way fear can, how it weighs on him, how he breaks it down and uses it. “To close it, we’d need-”  
  
“Your powers at full strength, yes, yes, I know.”  
  
Michael has a sharp retort forming, a passive-aggressive rebuke that he lets die, unheard.  
  
It’s been such a long night leading up to this and it has drained him of his own anger.   
  
Instead he looks up, into his brother’s face; for a brief moment, their eyes meet, and Lucifer nods.  
  
And for a little while it’s simple. Locking powers, entwining them around the breach they can both feel, both acknowledge. Lucifer with his alteration, Michael with the sparks of creation at his command. This is what they know, this is what they are.  
  
The reality snaps shut around them and it’s going to be a quickly passing respite, a very temporary fix, but these days it seems everything is.  
  
  


*

  
He’ll have to admit that Lux has its charm. 

It's the beat of the crowd in there, the pulse of the music - too loud, mostly disagreeable contemporary sounds as mass produced and generic as the people in this city - and the busy feeling of the entire building. It has an unquiet energy, a heavy beat. Everything about this place falls over him like a blanket of what isn’t _comfort_ , not quite, but serves as a protective layer between his powers and the rest of the world.

Only downside is the fact that his brothers also frequent this place.  
  
“Ah, Michael.” Amenadiel sits down next to him at the bar, sipping what looks like brandy. “I wanted to talk to you about last night.”  
  
“Really?” Michael downs his vodka and refills the glass. “I can’t imagine why.”  
  
He can, of course.  
  
Amenadiel wants to play big brother and gush about the fact that Michael’s powers had saved the day - or at least Lucifer. Wants to be father’s little servant who’s almost giving himself a fit thinking about, though not actually _saying_ , that this is the first time cowardly, sniveling Michael has ever done something worthy of praise.   
  
Back in the Silver City, they’d always play the same games. Deception, illusions, competitions. They'd play tirelessly like the children they never were but that the passing of time has turned them into, somehow. They’d battle each other and wring defeats out of their equals, as though the only way to understand themselves was through the domination or submission of their brothers and sisters. Lucifer mastered it all and what he did not excel at, he usually found a way to turn into an advantage anyway; the only thing Michael mastered better than anyone else was deception, the highest form of delusion, lies so powerful they found a shape of their own as they fell into being.  
  
Eons later, the games have not ended.  
  
How can they not be tired of them by now?  
  
As if on cue, Lucifer approaches, leaving a trail of glancing guests in his path. It’s remarkable how many sycophantic idiots his brother has enthralled here, and though he really shouldn’t be after all this time, he still is somewhat surprised. It had been the single most bewildering moment during his stunt as his brother: to walk down those stairs and feel the adoring crowd around him. It had been a sensation in his body, a borrowed memory.  
  
Stolen, he corrects himself. Lucifer would never willingly make the offer.  
  
“There _you_ are.” His voice is low and caught somewhere between irritation and fascination; it’s how he always spoke to the angels in Heaven, how he speaks to most people, his little collection of humans excluded.  
  
“Observant,” Michael nods.  
  
There’s a streak of confusion in his twin’s gaze, which makes his cruelty a little sharper. “Why?”  
  
Amenadiel looks like he’s about to protest but Michael isn’t having any kind of pitying intervention from God’s devout little warrior tonight. Not as long as he's still here and still awake.  
  
“The drinks are free,” he replies before anyone’s had time to say anything else. Lucifer gives him a searching glance, perpetually looking for signs of betrayal. Did he do that before, back when everything in the Silver City was still intact and nothing had torn them apart? Michael isn’t certain he wants to know.  
  
Lucifer scoffs. “If that’s the criteria, I’d gladly pay you to get you out of here-”  
  
In the corner of his eye, he can see Linda approaching and then Ella pushes between them, a drink in one hand, her cell phone in the other.  
  
“ _Hey_ ,” she says and the sharpness in her voice cuts into every jagged edge of him. “No más, okay? You two, with your epic sibling rivalry and stupid - just _don’t_. No fighting at Lux, that’s the rule, right?”  
  
“That has literally _never_ been the rule-” Lucifer begins but Ella shoots him a dark glance.  
  
“ _No más_.”  
  
Michael takes a mouthful of vodka to hide his smirk.  
  
It’s inexplicably irrational but the truce he has found with Ella Lopez - not to mention the odd understanding they have for each other - certainly brightens his time here on Earth. She’s frustratingly human, but her faults aren’t as exaggerated as many others’ and no matter how energetic her presence can be, there’s something calming about her. A bright light in her very nature, someone more prone to sentimentality might say. And there’s a stab of annoyance in him at the thought that this person, too, is someone Lucifer has on his side. That he found her first. All of Earth is his brother’s domain, just like it’s always been.  
  
They all share a table, for unfathomable reasons. He watches his brothers engage in an animated discussion about something regarding the tedious micromanage of the club. Michael had never been forced to fake any knowledge in the matter, Amenadiel has kept it afloat and regardless, Lucifer is never satisfied with anything either of them does. In this, too, he resembles daddy dearest. The way they all do. _Too hard on the drug dealers,_ he claims. _And you charged for drinks!_ _  
__  
_God help me, Michael thinks, but he stays.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
What feels like hours later, Ella demands answers about the realities and how they can tear into each other and fall, like those proverbial dominoes. Amenadiel sets off into a tedious explanation of matters no human can possibly have knowledge of or the imagination to even guess. Michel’s seen some of Ella's collection of science fiction and if those worlds are anything to go by, humanity has _no_ clue. 

That doesn't stop Amenadiel, and it doesn’t restrain Lucifer, because quite frankly nothing does. He takes all his chances to shine. 

"So, that's a bit of a recap, I suppose," he says, having talked them all through a possible what if-scenario involving the end of the multiverse. Michael isn’t sure what he had expected but this calm fascination hadn’t been on his list of possibilities, at least.  
  
Yet this is exactly what Ella displays behind her colorful drink.  
  
“Yeah, that totally makes sense.” She nods. ”In a completely messed up way. Because reality isn’t fixed.”  
  
"Why - yes, Miss Lopez," Lucifer smiles brightly. "Well _done_.”  
  
She points to her head while making a half-amused, half-serious face. “Not just a perky nerd, my friend.”  
  
“Certainly not,” Lucifer says and Michael downs his drink instead of sneering at the saccharine tone in his brother’s voice.  
  
The worst part, he decides, is that Lucifer is genuine about this. That he probably has convinced himself by now that he considers these humans important. Not just to _him_ , but on a fundamental, structural level. That he doesn’t differentiate between one human and the other, that he’d be able to make big decisions for the fate of their universe and not teether at the edge, not turn around and question its very foundation. That he wouldn't ultimately choose Chloe over everyone else on the planet, let the rest of them crash and burn as long as she lives.  
  
That’s humanity in a nutshell and angels aren’t _made_ for it. The multiverse would shatter around them if they were prone to that kind of moral.  
  
 _Right, Father?_  
  
But the God that made them all has seen it fit to shut up again, so Michael serves himself another drink.  
  
  
  
*  
  
  
  
  
Even later, halfway into a slight buzz of intoxication, Ella leans closer, a whiff of alcohol and perfume landing softly on his skin. Her face is different like this, loosened by drinking and laughing with the odd collection of friends. Her gaze, curiously open, travels over the scar, his furrowed brow, his hair that’s always been more curly than his twin brother’s, always less picturesque.  
  
“You’re really angry with Lucifer, huh?” she asks, suddenly, eyes narrowing. There’s a tucked-in smile and a weird sort of amusement in her tone, as if his prehistoric family drama is entertainment to her. “I mean, in general.”  
  
Michael drags a hand through his hair and immediately regrets it as it means letting another dozen curls lose from whatever attempts he previously might have made to keep them under control.  
  
“In _general_?” He shakes his head. “You mean in general, for rioting in Heaven and tearing it apart? Or for mishandling the kingdom he was left to rule for millennia and then still somehow ending up _rewarded_ for it? Or-”  
  
“Hey,” Ella takes a mouthful of her drink and places her hand on his arm. He can’t help but move, just a little, at her touch and she looks up at him. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you."

Michael clears his throat. "I'm hardly _upset_ , you must mistake me for a human."

"Okay." She gives him that look humans reserve for each other when they call bullshit. It tickles at the back of his mind. “I was just going to say that I get it.”

"You _get_ it?" He hears the incredulous tone, hears its sharp bitterness. 

"I mean, yeah." Ella looks down, as if she's finally embarrassed by something, by stretching her knowledge of humanity to include the divine. "You're angry because what he did changed your life and that's unfair. Like, of _course_ it is. It's also what family does, they screw things up and leave you to fix the mess."

"He didn't change my life, he-"

_Destroyed it. Destroyed me._

No, he can't say that. He isn't even certain it's the truth, or a pleasant enough lie.   
  
"Yeah," Ella says, regardless. Her hand is still touching him, lingering gently on the fabric of his jacket. He wonders if it doesn’t bother her, wonders why it doesn’t bother _him_. "I may have the wrong idea here but I do know a few things about messed up families. And I know that forgiveness usually helps."

Of course. The solution to everything. He’s browsed a few libraries down here and they’re fully stocked on self-help books dealing with fifty shades of forgiveness, of self-empowered individuals climbing to the top through the sheer force of positive thinking. Everything can be forgiven, everything can be achieved. It’s so _endlessly_ stupid.  
  
"There's forgiveness and then there's plain idiocy, Ella."

"Sure thing.” She shrugs. “But look, at the end of the day, you need people, yeah? Humans do at least, I don’t know about you angels. But we’re not made to be alone."

"You're hardly _alone_ , there are billions of you. Too many, by all accounts."

She looks at him with what appears to be pity. "Yeah, not really a number thing. All I'm saying is that when people matter to you, you can't just drop them like an old pair of shoes."  
  
Michael rubs the bridge of his nose, his gaze falling on her hand, the well-manicured fingernails that are usually painted in dark or glittery colours. Dark red now and even when she finally removes it from his arm, he can still sense it there, a light pressure against his untouchable being.  
  
“You’re in for some disappointment if you think I’m going to forgive Samael-”  
  
Ella sighs, shaking her head and running her red nails through her hair.  
  
“I’m not saying you should forgive Lucifer. Well, you _should_ , but I guess that’s like wishing for world peace.” A quick smile, melancholic and still somewhat amused and so very _her_ , as if he knows whatever _that_ is. The idea that he might spin a few turns in his head. “I’m saying you should forgive _yourself_.”

  
  
  



	8. Fear of God

  
  
Ella's anxiety mounts as the days pass, the date for Pete’s trial a burning presence in her calendar every time she picks up her phone. Eleven days, ten, eight and she can’t hide behind anything.    
  
“You can do this,” Chloe tells her, placing donuts and sandwiches and drinks and non-fat almond milk lattes in front of her. She does that, Ella knows, goes full-on mom/feeder whenever someone needs help. She doesn’t like to talk, she likes to  _ act  _ and making sure people are eating, apparently, is action.   
  
“How’s Lucifer doing?” Ella retorts every time, deflecting the awkward concern back to its sender. It's such an  _ abuela  _ move, integrated into her bones.   
  
“You, Miss Lopez, are stronger than you know.” Lucifer, hugging her voluntarily which, yeah, totally sweet, but actually even more  _ worrying  _ than anything else.    
  
“Afraid he won’t get his sentence? Cause man, don’t be. He’s got it coming.” Dan holds her gaze over the busy work schedule, across the briefings and overtime hours. He comes closer than the others, knows her better, understands the darker shades of her, the particular desire born from living your life like a closed door. 

She sends him off, too, with a few words and well-placed defenses. He never did care enough to get underneath those, or perhaps he’s always known that she wouldn’t let him. An entirely mutual understanding that is the only remainder of their brief  _ thing _ .    
  
“You’re scared that it won’t matter,” Michael says, his voice low and slippery through the otherwise empty lab. “Aren’t you? That regardless of this sentence, things will always feel this way. That justice won’t matter.”   
  
“Stop that.” She turns around, pulse increasing. “I don’t - don’t  _ read  _ me.”   
  
“I’m not,” Michael says and it takes her a few seconds to realize that he’s right, another few to notice the soft trace of surprise visible on his face, as though it just occurred to him, too. “I was guessing.”   
  
It's such a flurry of emotions, meeting his gaze. A rush of fear, subdued and controlled, as though they both hold it at bay; a surge of irritation radiating off her as well as of some kind of fractured compassion that seem to come from him. That sensation alone rattles inside like an old ghost. Why does he feel that way?    
  
“This is the guy with the lilies?” Michael looks at her over the desk, frowning.   
  
She already knows that he knows. That her body has let her down in this, too. That she’s shown him parts of her that she’d much rather erase, all of it just bursting out of her when she thinks they’re talking about lab reports or the weird stuff he tells her about dimensions and time. But of course she’s human at the end of the day. And human bodies are full of betrayals. Lilies and kisses, stupid promises she knew she couldn't trust but still did, a sense of disappointment that is as much directed at herself than it is at him, probably  _ more _ . After all, she was the idiot who believed in the psycho killer when he told her he loved her, that she was special, that what they had was  _ once in a lifetime, Ells, don’t question it. _   
  
She should have; she has always questioned everything else.    


"Pete." She exhales, nodding. “Yeah. That’s the one.”

  
  
  
*   
  
  
  
Afterwards, she won't remember exactly how and why she was there two days prior to the trial, let alone how  _ he  _ was. 

But they both were.

"Hello, Pete. I'm Michael. Nice to meet you." 

Even from where she's standing, half-hidden and with a taste of secrecy in her mouth, his voice is discernible, a thread of unrest in the room. She feels it along her spine, the roots of it spreading beneath them. How does he do that, she wonders; how does he make it seem like he’s made of the earth itself?

“Sure," Pete says, in that detached tone that makes her want to run him over with a truck. "Oh, you're my new lawyer?"    


"We can call me that."

“What is that supposed to mean?”    
  
Ella can hear the doubt creep into Pete's voice, even as he grapples for his beloved momentum.   


She can also hear Michael's amusement, shivering in the air. Her throat feels tight and dry.

"We'll see, won’t we?" he says, soft and slippery.

It's changed, she realizes. Over the past few weeks his voice has changed, morphed from cold contempt into something entirely different, at least to her ears. Before, back when he was still an anomaly in their increasingly weird life he used to sound like a grotesque mockery of a salesman trying to coax them all into Hell.  _ Oh, I do appreciate the irony of that _ , Lucifer grins in her head. Now, Michael possesses the false gentleness of someone aiming for utter cruelty but the layer of the disgust she used to sense is gone. 

"You are right, you know," he says, still as calm and with the same illusion of kindness.

"About what?"

"About everything." A brief pause before he continues. "If you had done better, if you had been a different son, she would have loved you."

"No," Pete says, too quickly. Ella clenches her teeth, listens. 

"Oh, come _on_." Michael chuckles darkly. "Don't insult yourself with this game. You’ve always known this. The question, Pete, isn’t why she screamed at you all the time, why she never kissed your chubby little baby cheeks. No. That’s not the question. Because you _know_ why. Even when you pretend you don't, when you look at her picture and ask yourself why didn’t she care? Why, when I was just a child. A mother must love her own child, right?”  
  
It’s a rhetorical question but Pete, ever oblivious to social codes, answers anyway.   
  
“Yes,” he says and the word hangs mid-air for a moment.   
  
“But how could she have loved _you_?” Michael asks. “You are _nothing_. In fact, you came out wrong. Your mother saw that. You know it, too. You know that’s why you have never done anything right. Why you have never mattered."

The voices quiet down. Ella swallows and for a second she thinks the terrible scene in the nearby room is finished, rather abruptly, that she won't get to hear more of it. Why does she want to hear more of it?

Then Pete mumbles something, Michael gives a muffled response and she can see him pace around a bit, the silhouette of him like a living ghost.

"The women you killed, you wanted them to fear you, didn't you?" His tone is harder now but still somehow benign in a callous, condescending sort of way, like he's so above or beyond it all that he doesn't have to truly  _ care _ . "You wanted to mean something. Yes you did, Pete. Fear what you can't love, right? It's a powerful thing, nobody understands that better than I do. But they never feared you, Pete, you couldn't even make them feel that. Oh, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking their bodies convulsed and whimpered in terror as they died - well, that's just a physiological response, nothing personal,  _ buddy _ . You didn't earn that. It had nothing to do with you - nothing has ever had anything to do with  _ you _ . All the parts you’ve played, all the  _ pretense _ , Pete and you have nothing to show for it. There is nothing inside you, that’s why you don’t feel anything. But - good news - I’m going to help you with that.”

“Yeah, right.” Pete swallows, paling visibly but he holds his head high. "I'm not afraid of you.”

"Oh, but you will be,” Michael says, softly. He leans closer and there’s a light emerging from beneath his skin, a hard, bright light that is at once terrifying and benevolent. Above all it’s  _ magnificent  _ in a biblical kind of way, she thinks, her throat parched and her head pounding, unable to look away. Angels are made from the hardest matter in the universe, they will remain when everything perishes. She’s read that somewhere, she reads it now, on Michael’s skin, in his posture, the hand he holds out for Pete as if he's asking for his submission. "You will be. When you're alone in your cell at night you will remember me. You will fall to your knees-" he pauses and Ella watches in awe and confusion how Pete drops to the floor, his eyes still on Michael who seems taller, his voice almost mercurial. "And you  _ will _ fear me. I will be with you,  _ always,  _ until the end of time."

"F-forgive me."

"That's not my job," Michael answers in that same unearthly tone. 

Pete sobs, a drawn-out ache in the room, like the noise from a dying animal; Michael turns around and sees her standing there. 

"I- " He looks a little unfocused for a moment, as if he's reeling from the powers he just used. His voice drops to an almost ordinary level, mere ghosts of the furious angel of the Heavenly Host lingering between the breaths. "I showed our friend Pete here-"

"The fear of God," Ella fills in and the world tilts, just a little.

  
  


*   
  


  
  
Michael stands in the lab when she finds him later that night. He's reading from one of the tablets and looks up, putting it down immediately as she enters.

He opens his mouth as if he's about to say something but Ella is quicker, moves through the room with a year's worth of relief in her veins.

When she first throws her arms around him, he doesn't budge. Not like Lucifer who's always squirming, not like Chloe and her distant correctness, keeping not every - but a good deal of - the hugs according to protocol. 

Michael stands there, unflinching, and allows himself to be hugged. There’s a slight waver, a little sidestep as he seems to be thrown off balance by her and she reminds herself to be mindful of his back or shoulder or whatever it is - whatever  _ is  _ it? - that is wrong with it. So there’s a slight waver but then also a fast recovery and she feels his hands somewhere around her shoulder blades, his touch light and warm.    
  
“Thank you,” she mutters with her mouth against his sweater. The fabric tickles her nostrils. He smells different than his brother, but he's just as reassuringly  _ solid _ , giving off a prickling heat that seems to live underneath his skin.  _ Thank you _ , she thinks again and holds him against her, fingers digging into his shoulders as the memories of before flutter around in her mind.    
  
There had been something desolate about the way he spoke to Pete.    
  
So much of it had been - she assumes - merely angelic: the primal fear, the way it aimed for the heart and slammed into its victim; the might, the shattering powers of God’s angel at work.   
  
Yet the solitude and the desperation, that had been human. 

"I- what for?" he asks, his words rumbling into her.   
  
_ Because it felt like you were doing it for me, that I had the heavenly host on my side. _   
  
She scratches her nail softly over a seam, brushes her thumb over the base of the collar of his sweater. Soap and toothpaste and cologne, she decides. Dry, clean scents. He  _ feels  _ that way too,  _ safe  _ in a way that makes absolutely no sense after today’s display, after what she knows about him, after the wrecking disputes and conflicts she’s learned about from Chloe.    
  
“For what?” He repeats the question with a soft edge of curiosity in his voice, like he really does want to know the answer and she believes that he wants to. He usually does when he asks something and Ella finds it endlessly refreshing in a city of make-believe. All of him, all of his brutal inhumanity and fragile ego, the glimpses of herself that she catches in the pieces that fall around them, revealed. It’s the same with Lucifer, she understands now that she knows. It’s the pull of them, the effect they both have.    
  
It makes her oddly pleased to be able to read him, like it’s a secret achievement in a game she didn’t even know she was playing.    
  
Now she can practically see his frown despite being enfolded in his arms.    


"For today." Ella thinks about the hollowness in Pete's gaze, thinks about how she used to know it so well it never actually seemed hollow but then it had, and everything snapped into place. Today, at court, it had been bursting with emotion, with tears. He had cried and cried, wringing his hands like some perverted Lady Macbeth before the judges. “I don’t know why you messed around with Pete’s head and don’t tell me because I don’t want to - just  _ thank you." _

"Well - right then." He clears his throat. "Are you okay?"

"No," she says after a moment of amazement at the question, the way it sounds when it comes from someone like him. The force behind everything he does and how it renders you breathless when it’s focused on you. "No, I'm not. But it's fine."   
  
“It is?” he asks, sounding just the right amount of sarcastic in his disbelief.    
  
She smiles to herself. “Sure thing.”

Her hands cling to him for a while longer and she can  _ swear  _ that Michael holds her a little bit tighter, hugging her harder, just before they hear others outside and let each other go. 

  
  



End file.
